Nowadays working parents increasingly rely on cellphones, pagers, and the internet to stay in touch with their children - to keep tabs, to give the kids emotional and logistical support. But new forms of communication tend to change social relationships.
Technology makes it easier though.
Or appears to anyway. I don't know about you, Marty, but when I was a kid growing up, we didn't have a telephone. And when we did get one, I must have been about 14, we, like most other British families, if the telephone rang after 9 o'clock in the evening, that was seriously bad news. In the early days of the telephone, he reminds us, the family used it to convey fairly important information. It was not for chatting.