I remember the first time one of my children texted me a photo of a skin lesion. It was not a photo of my own child’s skin, but that of a college roommate’s, and the message was something like: “Hi, Mom, is this anything to worry about?”
There was no identifying information — I couldn’t actually tell what part of the body I was looking at — and there was certainly no medical history (a 19-year-old in generally good health has had this mark on the arm for a week and it seems to be getting bigger but it doesn’t hurt if you press on it … that kind of thing). I tried to take it as a tribute — friends sitting around a dorm room, showing one another funny lumps and bumps, and up speaks my offspring: “Oh, my mom will be able to tell you what that is!”
The intensity with which teenagers live on and through their phones is hardly news. Many parents find themselves trying, and often failing, to legislate phone use at the table and at bedtime. So going away to college does mean, among many forms of independence, phone freedom.
[For more of this story, written by Perri Klass, go to http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/...?ref=health&_r=1]
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