Older people need to learn to text in emergencies: young people can help by sending texts to older relatives

You may realise from some of the content of this blog that one of my retirement activities is taking street photos. You can see the results in my Flickr photostream. If you're not familiar with Flickr, either scroll through the stream or click on 'Albums' and look or search for albums that say 'people'.

Link to my Flickr site.

This is a picture that I took in Wimbledon recently. In one way it is commonplace and in a related way unusual. Can you see why?

The answer to the first question is that the young woman at the bus stop is using her mobile phone, and this is a characteristic of many, if not most, street photos I take nowadays. Young people are mostly holding, and often using, a mobile. The answer to the second question is that the older man is also using his mobile, and this is very unusual - most older people in my pictures are talking or walking without the mobile.

Which tells you something about the generations. Most older people do not see the need to be continually connected in the way that is natural to younger people. But this means that they lose out in emergencies. If an older person gets admitted to a hospital or faces some other major change in life, they often have no way of contacting people for social reasons or to call on help, because they have not become accustomed to using their phone.

In particular, they lose out because they have not learned to text, and their friends do not text, so they have no convenient way of sending and leaving a message. And their friends, even if they have a mobile phone, never look at texts because they're not accustomed to getting them.

Texting on a mobile is so natural to younger people that they do not realise and cannot believe that their parents and grandparents cannot and do not do the same, and this means that they're not practised enough to use texts in emergencies. One of the best services young people can provide for their older relatives is teaching them to text and encouraging them to practise by sending them regular texts.