Families and Technology: A New Interest Group
By Evan Imber-Black
"Ms. Chang . . .placed a long poetic ad in the personals section of Yahoo, the Internet service . . . Buried among the responses was one response so right it gave her goosebumps. 'By the third e-mail, I was in love' Ms. Chang said . . .' It was so great to have someone to share all your thoughts with, someone you didn't even know'."
The New York Times Weddings page, June 28, 1998, p. st.7.
At the recent AFTA meeting in New York, a new interest group began to examine the impact of all of the new technologies—computers, internet, e-mail ,cell phones ,etc.—on couple and family relationships. I initiated this interest group in response to the growing set of clinical issues we are all finding as families come to therapy presenting problems involving meeting and "dating" on-line, internet affairs, parent-child conflicts related to the uses of technology, etc.
Our group membership spanned the cultural spectrum of responses to technology in our own lives, including technophiles who love the computer, use e-mail regularly, take classes on-line, to neo-Luddites who hate the technology and want to stay far away from it, but find that clients are bringing it into therapeutic conversations and family disputes.
Since this was an initial interest group meeting, our conversation ranged far and wide, including clinical questions about internet affairs; debates about whether the "addiction" metaphor is suitable for describing people who spend hours and hours every day at the computer; what it means for family relationships that children are often more knowledgeable than their parents about technology; how parents can regulate their children's uses of the computer; and how or whether e-mail should be used between therapist and client, whether for administrative matters like appointment setting or for actual therapeutic exchange. Our conversation focused on secrets, and the new ways that the internet both facilitates secrets and invites snooping on one another's e-mail in couples. We examined the positive ways that technology can connect people, as when long lost friends find us via the internet (whether we want to be found or not), grandparents and grandchildren e-mailing across thousands of miles, gay youth from geographically isolated areas discovering that they are not alone, adult adoptees doing searches for their biological parents, or shut-in patients who can contact their doctors. We struggled with whether these issues are simply "old wine in new bottles," in the sense of any new area being introduced into a family system and the family responding to it, or whether something truly different is happening in families that we need to understand and for which we need to create new theory and practice. Our consensus was that it is some of each. Much of the existing literature on the psychological and relational impact of technology is individually focused, rather than interactional and systemic, calling for some original work by family therapists.
To stimulate conversation, we looked at a piece of video depicting a family on vacation at the beach in which the father spends most of the day in the vacation house e-mailing his work, talking on the cell-phone and checking for messages, and bringing the equipment down to the beach when he finally joins his family. He spoke about how needing to have the technology with him at all times and to stay constantly connected to work, even on vacation was "75 percent psychological and 25 percent real." His wife expressed that he was, in fact, more present to the family because the technology allowed him to frequently check in with his office, and in between the check-ins he could relax. This video led us to discuss the need to ask couples and families more routinely about the place of technology in their lives, even if this isn't a presenting issue. I offered an assessment list of questions, including:
- How much time is spent by which family members with technology?
- Who decides what technology to acquire?
- Is the technology a source of support, a source of stress, or both?
- How has the technology impacted the boundary between work and family life?
- How are daily rituals affected by technology?
- Is a couple polarized about technology? Where do children fit in such polarization?
- How has technology affected a couple or family's sense of time?
We agreed to meet again next year with a focus on clinical cases. Pat Colucci-Coritt will co-facilitate the interest group with me.
Evan Imber-Black, PhD, Director, Center for Families and Health at the Ackerman Institute for the Family
