Phoning Home For Busy Families, Communication Technology Can Help Keeps Kids In Touch, Out Of Trouble

In her 14 years, Sarah Maginnis has learned that life as the daughter of a busy attorney can short-circuit not only a teen’s social life but also those everyday mother-daughter chats.

Her mother, Heather Morcroft, was constantly on the road counseling clients and always seemed to be out of pocket when Sarah needed to ask permission to visit a friend or to discuss the burning issues of the day such as boys or school.

Morcroft - among the 20 percent of working Americans who has one or more children younger than age 15 - weighed the evidence and reached the verdict that mother and daughter needed beepers. Morcroft bought a pair, and life was good. That is until she realized that there weren’t many telephone booths in which to duck into in order to respond to a page while zipping down Interstate 4.

Solution: Cellular phone.

“I have found (the cell phone and beeper) to be incredibly helpful,” said Morcroft, 38, of Orlando. “We now have a good system where we can reach each other 100 percent of the time.”

Many busy parents like Morcroft practice what one might call “virtual parenting” or “teleparenting,” using an arsenal of communication gizmos to stay closer in touch with their children.

Gadgets and gizmos aren’t meant to replace face-to-face interaction between parent and child. But as the Bureau of Labor Statistics notes, among two-parent families, 71 percent have both parents in the labor force.

So “with fewer adults at home to turn to with questions, children turn to them at work,” using electronic means such as pagers and phones, said Laurence Steinberg, a psychology professor at Temple University in Philadelphia.

Parents haven’t shucked the telephone as a means to reach out and touch, comfort, castigate or chuckle with their children.

But a growing number have discovered that they need additional gadgets to improve parental monitoring - parents’ supervision and awareness of their children’s activities and whereabouts - and to share their child’s day, in spirit and thought, if not in body.

Poor parental monitoring is linked to children’s conduct glitches and delinquent behavior, according to a 1995 report released by the Families and Work Institute, a New York research group that studies ways to help employees balance their job and family responsibilities.

“Working parents have an added level of complexity in monitoring their children,” according to the report The Impact of Parental Employment on Children. “They may need to monitor their children through phone calls or other alternative methods.”

The use of pagers, for instance, has more than doubled since 1992, a trend which can largely be attributed to increased use by families. According to Motorola, family use accounts for more than half of the estimated 34 million pagers currently in use. As Teresa Sphaler can attest, a good communications system is essential for working parents with children as busy as her football-playing son Justin, 12, and daughter Deanna, 9, the cheerleader.

“I have a telephone everywhere I go,” Sphaler, 32, owner of Accounting Advantage Associates in Kissimmee, Fla., said of her cellular phone. “It helps me stay in touch with my children and to stay abreast of the situation on the homefront.”

For Sphaler, the telephone is a powerful tool for maintaining order and discipline.

Each child is required to check in once home from school. Justin gets home first, and then Deanna. Sphaler uses each child’s five-minute or so call to inquire about the child’s day at school and to “reiterate their responsibilities,” she said. “I’m just controlling the atmosphere as if I were there,” Sphaler said. “I want them to pick up the telephone and talk to me as if I were standing there.”

For parenting by phone or pager to be effective, a firm foundation of guidelines must be in place. Establish a routine for your children to follow regarding homework, television viewing and chores. Lay ground rules detailing what situations constitute a phone call.

“I would use the phone for brief calls meant to solve an immediate problem,” Steinberg said, to “make sure the child has gotten home safely and handle any emergencies.”

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: Teleparenting tools Pagers. Also known as beepers, they allow the caller to punch in a telephone number where he or she may be reached or to leave a message. Cost: For numeric pagers, the average cost is $60, with an average monthly service charge of $8-$10. Alphanumeric pagers, which allow you to type in a short message and a phone number, cost on average $150, with a $60 average monthly service charge. Cellular phones. Cellular phones once were the toys of the rich and famous. Now, you can’t walk into a restaurant without hearing a chorus of ringing cellular phones. Cost: With activation, cellular phones range from $1 to $1,100. Monthly service charges begin at $15.95 and go higher depending on usage. Some retailers will waive the activation fees, which normally run $40 to $45. Answering machines. Answering machines do much more than record messages from your bill collectors. For parents, one cool feature on some machines is a memo mode that allows the user to record a message for a family member, which is then played back with the regular phone messages. Cost: From $19.97 to $79.99 for the standard erasable tape models, and from $39.97 to $299 for the tapeless models which record messages via a digital computer chip.