Families’ cyber-ties bind, poll finds

Parents and children might rush through their days in different directions, but the American family is as tight-knit as in the last generation — or more so — because of the widespread use of cell phones and the Internet, according to a new poll.

In what was described as the first detailed survey of its kind, researchers reported that family life has not been weakened, as many had feared, by new technology. Rather, families have compensated for the stress and hurry of modern life with cell phone calls, e-mail and text messages and other new forms of communication.

“There had been some fears that the Internet had been taking people away from each other,” said Barry Wellman, a sociology professor at the University of Toronto and one of the authors of the report, published by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. “We found just the opposite.”

In the poll, 60 percent of adults said that the new technologies did not affect the closeness of their family, while 25 percent said cell phones and online communication made their families closer and 11 percent said that the technology had a negative effect.

Wellman said families appreciated the innovations because “they know what each other is doing during the day.” This, he said, comports with his other research, which shows that technology “doesn’t cut back on their physical presence with each other. It has not cut down on their face time.”

The findings were based on a nationally representative poll of 2,252 people, which explored technology use and profiled a group of 482 adults who were married or living together with minor children. These “traditional nuclear families” have been of particular scholarly interest, the report’s authors said. They tried to examine trends in single-parent families, too, but the poll numbers were too small to be valid, they said.

Cell phones and Internet use were widespread in two-parent households, regardless of education, income, employment, race and ethnicity, with 94 percent saying at least one adult used the Internet and 84 percent saying children were using the Internet.

This marks a large change in short order. Only since the start of the decade has a majority of Americans been Internet and cell phone users, researchers said.

Where technology has changed family life, those polled said it was for the good.

Forty-seven percent of adults said cell phones and the Internet had improved the quality of family communication.

Another 47 percent said there was no effect, and 2 percent said there had been a decrease in quality.

Many parents have embraced technology because they think their children will benefit, said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet project.

“Parents are extending themselves to provide their children with technology because they think it’s important or useful,” he said.

The ease of being in touch has created a phenomenon that Rainie calls “love taps,” in which couples exchange hellos and touch base with a regularity that did not exist 10 years ago.

This practice extends to children, too. Forty-two percent of parents with children ages 7 to 17 call their sons and daughters once a day or more on a cell phone, 35 percent keep in touch on a landline and 7 percent communicate by text, according to the poll.

The popularity of high-speed Internet — now in 66 percent of two-parent homes, according to the poll — has created another family phenomenon: huddling around a screen to watch YouTube videos together or other Internet entertainment, a kind of “virtual hearth,” Rainie said.