the new latchkey kids

when i was younger, i remember over hearing adults talk about latchkey kids and even as a child...i knew it was considered a negative or sad thing. i knew that these where the kids that i went to school with who didn't get picked up by a carpool mom friend or walk in to a home filled with the smell of freshly baked cookies and a glass of cold milk waiting for them on the table. these school friends walked home to an empty house, let themselves in, and then were responsible for entertaining themselves until someone arrived home from work that night. i have been thinking about these kids lately and wondering what the people who felt sorry for those kids would think about kids these days. i think we have new latchkey kids. they are the cell phone kids. about a year ago, i started realizing how much time a text here and a phone call there would take away from my kids. i felt like if my cell phone went off...i needed to answer it. what if it was super important or an emergency of some sort. someone was calling. someone was texting. obviously they needed me. i don't want to miss anything. you know what i realized? it was never any of those things. i realized how i could be right with my 3 precious little ones...in the same room with them...but be missing them. when that phone was in my hand...i was disengaged. and i don't even have one of the fancy phones with internet and e-mail and games, etc. etc. etc. that is when i decided that i did not want to miss what my kids were saying to me. i did not want them to see me staring at my phone screen or typing a text or listen to me chit chatting away. i wanted them to see my eyes. i wanted them to see and feel me focusing on them and what they wee showing me or telling me about their day or their circumstances. i wanted to be engaged with them. i decided to put the phone away. it was no longer going to be stored on the table or in my back pocket to ensure that i didn't miss something. it was in my purse. i realized that we do not have to be accessible 24 hours a day. a while back, the staff at our church all got iphones. i can not believe how excited everyone was about this. it was as if it was christmas morning for a bunch of little kids. i heard how much more convenient this will make things. e-mail...enternet...maps...facebook...online poker at your fingertips. whoa!! how did we ever manage before? chad did not get one. we had just re-signed our contract with sprint and it was going to cost as much as the phone to get out of it, so we decided it was not a necessary use of our money or the church's. however, as everyone used their cool, new gadget, chad began to feel like he was missing out. he really wanted this thing. so, we waited until our contract was up and the iphone was much cheaper and he got it. i will admit that there are small ways that having this phone makes certain things like finding a restaurant easier, but i find myself hating it. i have heard it called by other friends of mine "the other woman." i can relate. we had a conversation the other night where chad said that he felt like he was checking out all the time...he wasn't engaged...it was too easy to be distracted by this little piece of technology and all of it's aps (that's iphone talk). i was super proud of him and really excited at the thought of not competing with a phone anymore. he was feeling the same thing i was feeling about my phone a while back. during this conversation, we talked about how if we thought the latchkey kids had it rough from when we were little...how must the cell phone kids feel now. it got me thinking about what the consequences are going to be for the kids who grow up with parents who were always on their phones...whether talking, e-mailing, messing around on facebook, or playing games. i just know that sometimes it feels lonelier to have someone in your presence who is totally disengaged from you than to not have anyone there at all. we don't want our kids to be the latchkey kids of today...that's for sure. at the risk of sounding like some sort of 6 shooter...join us and put your cell phones away.