To ban my parents from using mobile phones

[AndromedaGal]

I am fed up instructing my parents (in late 60's) how to use their mobiles. They don't even know how to turn the volume up properly, so all you hear when you call them is "Hello? Hello?...." Followed by an inevitable pause then, "Oh. Er, it doesn't appear to be working Pam. How do I........." and then lots of intermittent sounds as they randomly press buttons, followed by me being inevitably cut off. This has been going on for years. It's just painful.

They ring people inadvertently when they've stashed their phones in their back pockets because they don't know how to lock the keypads.
They send text messages to landlines.

They delete contacts, forget to turn them on when they're out and about (so what's the effing point having one) and lose them ALL.THE.TIME. And accessing the internet on their phones just causes a whole new level of trauma.

Why can't they learn the basic principles of mobile phone usage? They're intelligent and manage very well independently. But it's so exasperating as they don't always take their phones with them, and when they do, they have them turned off.

I think they should just stick to their landline TBH. Anyone else experience similar??

My mum and dad both have smart phones which I spent ages setting up for them, adding apps they wanted (but never use) adding phone numbers for everyone in our family and mum still walks round with her paper phone book in her bag and uses that instead of just selecting from the phone!

I get called at various times of the day and once with her crying down the phone at 4am that it’s broken and can’t hear anything and how will she now be able to call her sister for a chat, turns out she flicked it silent! She’s 65 and dad 70! They can use WhatsApp which I suppose is a blessing but she’s just discovering emojis at the moment and sending them instead of words! I’m pretty sure I need a PhD in hieroglyphs to understand her! It’s hard work, I absolutely feel your pain

Firstly someone in their 60's isn't elderly. The tone of this thread is patronising as fuck. These are people who probably spent many hours teaching you skills such as reading,.using cutley, writing, going to the toilet. Listening to you playing an instrument badly, sitting beside you when you were learning to drive. Have a word with yourselves.

@ElvisPresleysSideburns, your post about the Lidl app made me laugh out loud.

@hellywelly3

We have customers in their early 60’s that say they don’t use any type of phones/computer etc. I can’t understand it. Computers have been common place in homes for 30 years when they would of been early 30’s. Why don’t people keep up with things, it makes them very reliant on others.

Early 60s? They must have been older than that. Computers have been on every desk in most workplaces for at least 20 years.

One of the mobile shops here pre Covid did free sessions for people who needed training on phones ..think it was EE ... but might be worth looking into

@Blueblueblur

Firstly someone in their 60's isn't elderly. The tone of this thread is patronising as fuck. These are people who probably spent many hours teaching you skills such as reading,.using cutley, writing, going to the toilet. Listening to you playing an instrument badly, sitting beside you when you were learning to drive. Have a word with yourselves.

Yes. It's yet another typical ageist MN thread.

Jesus mine are the same, 70s, 89 yo aunt is bloody brilliant. If my mum would put her bloody glasses on before randomly stabbing the phone we would be in a better place.

my late 80s dad is a whizz with a smartphone, laptop and tablet. Just saying...

for those who are not, you can buy text and talk phones on ebay (this is the one positive about our thriving drug trade, plenty of burner phones). They are great as the battery lasts two weeks even if the phone is used and there is just a keypad and two other buttons. I carry one such as my mobile, fits neatly in a pocket and copes with being dropped which a chunky smart brick would not.

It's not ageist it's about willing to learn. Mil 71 won't even countenance a phone.

You. An always Guarantee that when a phone goes off during a church service. It's an elderly persons. They usually can't find it and do t know how to silence it quick enough. One lady actually answered hers the other day. Midway through mass. My dad will
Often answer his and say "oh i'm in a meeting"
I keep telling him how rude that is!

My mam is hopeless with her passwords. She expects me to remember them all for her and gets huffy when I can't. I even installed a password manager on her tablet/laptop and she uninstalled it because it was spying on her. I've had to reset her online banking password at least five times.

Don't even get me started on their phones. Dad rarely changes his and can't figure it out (basic brick phone, have been through it with him multiple times) and both of them have lost or broken multiple phones.

My mother has discovered Facebook.

She now keeps calling me because apparently I’d sent her a photo but she cannot find it anymore, when finds it she keeps leaving comments with those huge glittery gifs, and she has at four accounts because she loses them. She keeps adding me to random groups, some by mistake, some by design and gets upset because I’m not very enthusiastic in joining Best Pumpkin competition or Canasta Lovers. Her sister, my aunt keeps doing exactly the same, but she’s also keen on passive aggressive updates, a bit like “Happy is the mother whose children have not forgotten all about her” which my mother keeps liking.

It’s a full time job, keeping up with her phone usage.

They are only in their late 60's? Mobile phones have been around for a very long time now. This would drive me insane.
I agree.
I got my first mobile in 1996 so 25 years ago. To be putting up with this faff would do my head in!.
I debriefed my mum from face book for similar reasons!

It took my mum a long time to get better at it (she's mid 70's) and actually she improved a lot when we gave an old iphone instead of her basic nokia. It used to be horrendous, she'd sent you a text and then turn it off for 24hours to save the battery!! Or even worse, ring you, not leave a message if you missed the call and then turn it off so you'd be worrying that there was an emergency! I think she only really started keeping her phone switched on all the time when she started looking after the grandchildren. She was adamant she wouldn't be able to use the iphone until she realised it was basically the same as the ipad but with a call button! I still get asked every time she wants a new app installing but she's mastered taking photos and uploading them to shared albums and she even managed to set herself up on whatsapp during the first lockdown (although it was a neighbourhood chat group so I suspect someone assisted!).
My Dad probably couldn't even tell you where his mobile is!

My Dad is great with his phone probably better than me

Mum on the other hand - she knows the basics knows how to zoom & WhatsApp but anything more complicated and she goes into a right tizz

@ChardonnaysPetDragon

My mother has discovered Facebook.

She now keeps calling me because apparently I’d sent her a photo but she cannot find it anymore, when finds it she keeps leaving comments with those huge glittery gifs, and she has at four accounts because she loses them. She keeps adding me to random groups, some by mistake, some by design and gets upset because I’m not very enthusiastic in joining Best Pumpkin competition or Canasta Lovers. Her sister, my aunt keeps doing exactly the same, but she’s also keen on passive aggressive updates, a bit like “Happy is the mother whose children have not forgotten all about her” which my mother keeps liking.

It’s a full time job, keeping up with her phone usage.

We made a family pact not to show my mum facebook!! Whenever she asked we'd change the subject quickly and now she can do shared albums on apple that seems to have pacified her.

I know, we were ticking along nicely, her Facebook-less nicely until one of my cousin showed her how to do it. Never liked the bastard. Even as children he was bad, used to steal my rice pudding.

I'm not far off 60. We got a home internet connection in 2000. From memory, a lot of people we knew had the internet at home a year or two before that, or in some cases even earlier, but there was a huge surge in the early 00s.

Many people would have been using a computer in some form at work far earlier, with some form of internet capability, but it would have been patchy. Universities were in the forefront. Word processors were common in the private sector from the early 80s, but probably connected to a huge mainframe (big firms) or to a minicomputer (smaller places). People in ordinary office jobs didn't have a PC on the desk until the 90s at the earliest unless you worked in data entry or as a word processor operator. I went on maternity leave in 92 and had no access to a PC at that point.

Small, light, affordable mobile phones were around in the early 00s, but at that point all you could do with them was make calls and send texts.

Smartphones came several years later.

I don't think it's age, I think it's attitude. I have met a number of people my ageish (mid 40s) who almost pride themselves on being unable to do more than the bare minimum on their mobile phones.

My mum was the communicator in our family so was an early adopter of an iPhone. She wasn't terribly good at it but could send a WhatsApp and had cracked FaceTime, storing phone numbers etc. When she died, my dad figured he'd better step up (having been totally clueless prior to that) and while he keeps it quite simple, he has learnt quite a lot and can navigate various apps on his iPad or iPhone (eg kindle, news etc on iPad, mail on phone) etc. He also asked me once about taking photos from WhatsApp to print and we now send him photos either via WhatsApp or via shared photo albums which he then sends (via email I think?) to his local photo printing store and they then print them out for him. He doesn't understand how it works, and can't fix anything when it goes wrong, but he has mastered more than enough to use his phone and iPad in a useful manner.

Meanwhile, MIL can only just about manage Skype on her computer, and it took DH and BIL hours to get it set up and working. Any issues and she's flummoxed. She can't and won't use her cell phone and absolutely can't even receive a text message. So to Skype her, you have to call her landline first then wait for her to load up her computer.

On the other hand, I've set up a google link for photos for her. I've realised she doesn't understand how to check it on an ongoing basis so I just resend her the link every 3 months and she thinks I'm a tech goddess!

My DM78 and DD78 are internet fiends, booking flights, shopping etc. at the drop of a hat. They’re never off Messenger and FaceTime. My dad embarrasses up with childhood photos on FB. I’m not sure it’s necessarily an age thing. They could teach my 52 year old colleague a thing or two and he needs to use tech for his job.

YABVU

There are classes and books to help teach people how to use tech.

I taught my parents when they were in their 70s and they were great with it until they both passed. I created a book of the most common things they wanted to do so they could look things up if needed.

I've been in tech professionally for 40 years now.
I quite enjoy playing the doddering old fool around youngsters who don't know who I am.

Jus think, you get to enjoy you DGC being aggravated with you and wanting to ban you from some future tech you don't understand.

My 87yr old Dad has the Doro phone, he still manages to call my DH when he trying to look at his text message.

He does not know how to text or delete texts so when his cleaner goes he gets her to delete them, they are only ever about his Tesco delivery.

My DH is pretty bad at technology he is late 50's and has never sent an email !

To ban my parents from using mobile phones

What an arrogant person you are, since when did children 'ban' their parents doing anything?

YANBU. Actually people don’t realise the stress is causes on those dealing with the other end of their poor phone calls and mistaken calls. My PIL are very similar and it causes genuine problems.

There's those that don't mind learning and those that resist all attempts to drag them kicking and screaming into the 21st Century. Mindset is everything and intelligence levels have no relevance!

There are 4 'old ladies' (78-83) in my world.

My mother worked in accounts- using a PC- until she was 76 but 4 years on, can just about answer the basic big button mobile we got her years ago. She has it under sufferance but we insist she keeps it in her pocket as she's getting a bit unsteady on her feet.

DP's mum only has a landline. He recently bought her a new handset as the battery in the cordless one she has been using is dying. She won't plug the new one in its place because she's convinced she'll lose her phone number

On the other hand, MIL and auntie regularly FaceTime and can send texts/forward photos. My auntie got her first phone less than a year ago after being widowed. You can guess which two I speak to most...