As Our Parents Age

Yes, Grandma is on Facebook

Join Facebook?  For three years I avoided the site. I knew that some of my friends from work, church, and other activities were joining, but I just did not feel like it was a fit. My daughter, then in graduate school, used the social networking site, and she occasionally suggested I get started with Facebook. Still I refrained.

At some point, however, I became aware that my mother and my daughter were communicating with each other more than usual. They knew things about each other that I did not know. Finally my daughter mentioned that her grandmother  – my mother — was on Facebook and that the two of them had “friended’ one another. That’s when I called Mom, at that time age 81. She explained that her fellow workers from the Obama campaign, exceptional young people she called them, had arranged virtual reunions on Facebook. They wanted her to participate and helped her get started.

So I found that I was in the middle, but basically out of the generational communication loop. By the time I tuned in, my mother had over 100 friends, all people she knew in one way or another (no strangers, she reassured me), and quite a few in her age range. I signed up for Facebook.

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August 26, 2010 Posted by Marti Weston | aging parents, Intergenerational Interaction, iPad for Dad, seniors and computers, seniors and social networking, Seniors and Technology | adult children, aging parents, Albany Times Union, elders, Facebook, lifelong learning, online communication, seniors, social network, technology | 7 Comments