Texting, cell phones and the 'Say Anything' generation

We were an hour into the mini-vacation and the squabbling in the back seat was driving me crazy. Yes, there were the usual "Stop touching me!" and the "Move over!" but there was more, and it was more pointed.

15-year old: You don't know anything about music.

11-year old: You're dumb about everything else.

15-year old: You're getting on my nerves.

11-year old: You're just dumb.

Hear 50 miles of that and you're ready to pull over, drop the kids off at the side of the road and climb into the cab of the next trucker who comes by.

"This has to stop now or I'm turning around," I said to the rearview mirror. In the 10 minutes of actual silence that followed, I pondered this question of sibling rivalry. Will they ever stop arguing? How old will I be then? Will I even be able to hear them when it finally happens? And why do they do this?

I'm pretty sure they like each other, these two. I've seen them sit on the sofa in comfortable silence, watching a movie; seen them share the last cookie; watched my son play tag in the yard with his younger sister, even now.

So why the bickering?

A bolt of recognition came from behind me in the car. Both were holding cell phones, and they were texting their friends and cousins. With each thumb-typing of a message, they were conveying a small snippet of information or, more likely, emotion. With those devices in their hands, they could express every last blip that crossed their minds.

Later I checked the texts my daughter sent from my phone. In a long chain with her best friend, she reported separately that she was tired, hungry, bored, sick of her brother, sick of riding in the car, missing the friend, missing the dog and afraid there would be sharks at the lake we were headed to.

I didn't see my son's texts to his buddies, but I'm guessing they were even more profound.

I'm not strolling down nostalgia lane here, but remember before cell phones? I went through four years of college without really talking to my best friends except when I was home for holidays.

Yes, we wrote letters, but more to the point, we actually had impulses and feelings then that we did not express. I'm sure I felt all of those things my daughter felt in the car -- probably on an hourly basis -- but lacking a way to report my emotional temperature, I kept it to myself.

And my logic follows that when a kid is used to writing down and transmitting his every little thought, it's even easier to say them out loud.

Really, why bother having a thought if you can't share it? If a tree falls in the woods and you don't text someone about it, it might not have happened.

"You are so disgusting," my daughter said to her brother. Would I have thought the same thing of my sisters when I was 11? Of course. The difference in generations is that I probably wouldn't have said it out loud. And definitely not in front of my mother.

Maybe the feeling of that little keyboard under the fingers makes kids want to say something. As a writer, I know the feeling. It would be nice if texting were turning all our children into writers, but I doubt it's that. We all have small, petty thoughts. And if we have a way to write them down and send them off, then why not just come out and say it.

Beth Dolinar is a former Riverside resident and Pittsburgh television reporter who is staying at home to raise her two children. She can be reached at cootieJ@aol.com.