Writing -- Baby Talk: Techno kids

The following article featured in a weekly column on parenting in the Women on Wednesday supplement of The Evening Echo, one of Ireland's leading regional daily newspapers. It appeared in the 29 September 2004 issue.

I got a phone call earlier today from my mum. She was having trouble with the computer and needed a bit of telephone tech support. Mum is a bit of a technophobe, but is trying hard to embrace the information age. She can send and receive e-mails and even does most of her banking online these days, but as soon as something out of the ordinary occurs I get a phone call.

This time it was a printer problem. We walked through what she'd been doing just before the problem occurred, exactly what had happened, and what the computer was telling her and before long I talked her through getting everything back up and running. As I put down the receiver I couldn't help but wonder whether that would be me twenty years down the line, talking to a life-sized 3D image of one of the girls on the "holo-phone" as I struggled to get to grips with the techno-wizardry of the day?

Somehow I doubt it. Although I believe technology will continue to develop at a ludicrous pace as the girls grow up, I don't think my generation will be left behind in quite the same way that our parents were. It's partly to do with the pace of change that we've already grown accustomed to. Technology over the last three decades or so has progressed much more rapidly than it did in the thirty years before that. I've grown up in a culture of rapid technological development and now I habitually adapt to it - even expect and anticipate it.

My parents' generation, in contrast, never really needed to cope with that pace of change. They could get by very well as long as they could flick a light switch and twiddle the knobs on the toaster. When it came to more complex things like working the microwave, tuning in the telly or programming the video there were always the kids to fall back on.

I could be horribly wrong, of course. It is entirely possible that I'll be left floundering, unable to keep pace with the technical leaps and bounds that my daughters take in their stride. Just in case I don't keep up I'm planning on making sure that the girls are completely au fait with the technology of today so that they're in a position to offer me guidance when I have to confront the technology of tomorrow.

Like all children they seem to pick these things up with remarkable ease. Without anyone teaching them how they've already worked out how to turn on the TV and play their videos and DVDs. They're showing more and more interest in my computer too.

We have some pre-school CDs for the PC, and a couple of evenings a week they sit with me in front of the computer instead of having a bedtime story. These are educational games that are visually stimulating and interactive. They include simple puzzles and problems for children to solve in order to progress the narrative of the story. The girls love it, and while I'm the one solving most of the puzzles at the moment, they're getting involved and it's introducing them to the basic elements of using a computer - like using the keyboard and mouse to interact with things that are happening on the screen.

At the moment I'm still in the driving seat - but the way they're picking things up that probably won't last for long.