Tech smarts, street smarts

Randy Schur, 15, one of the expert sources in a Philadelphia Inquirer piece on parenting the digerati (basically all teenagers), had a revelation as he was explaining socializing by IM: "If you want a girl to like you, you probably should talk to them." "Connected and cut off" is one of those great articles that digs in and offers multiple perspectives. Among other things, it hints at why parents are "dinosaurs," as one parent quoted in the piece put it, and why we aren't. And it talks about adolescence as well as IM-ing - man *and* machine - how adolescence and parent-child relations haven't change even as technology very definitely has. Yeah, teens have tech literacy, but we have a little more life literacy, and today - more than ever – teens need the latter too, even if they don't think they do.