Missing skills
August 15, 2007

I handed my 14 year old daughter a message as she got into the car last night. It was from a woman who wanted her to babysit and Emma needed to call her back immediately. Emma is bright and LOUD and funny and talks-talks-talks (hey, she’s my kid…what can I say?), but when she got on the phone with this woman, she was all “Um, er, Uh” and stumbled her way through saying something that should have been very simple: “I am not available to sit for you tomorrow.” When she hung up and I commented on how she made that more difficult than it needed to be, she said, “I CAN’T TALK ON THE PHONE!!!” and then went on to say that she actually writes a script out whenever she needs to speak to someone about even the simplest things. Well, okay, I thought. She is a child and the phone can be intimidating and all.

That night as I painted my oldest daughter’s room, I got to thinking about issue again and came up with a different conclusion. My girls spend countless hours IMing their friends, sending text messages (Kati, my oldest at 17, sends and receives nearly 5000 text messages a month. A MONTH!), and lastly talking on their cell phones. They are adept at written (read: badly misspelled or abbreviated acronyms) communication, but lousy at speaking directly to someone. What is wrong with THIS picture?

Communication is the base of doing business. What is considered simple and a no-brainer to us old schoolers will soon become a skill that must be taught. Was it Plato who said, “I weep for the future?” or was it the waiter in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off?”

Posted by on August 15, 2007 | Comments (0)