First off I love my mom and want her to be part of my life, I also want her to see her grandson because at the moment she can’t see him in person and being almost 75 she could die before ever seeing him in person.
I left a fully functional basic PC with her when I left the USA, she never even turned it on. I paid for a few months of ISP service after leaving, went to waste.
I mailed her a pre paid smart phone and I paid for one months service, she never even turned it on! Total waste of cash.
She has a cell phone so old it doesn’t even work unless you leave it plugged in, I sent her a replacement battery and she refuses to put it in the phone, she’d rather sit there tethered to the AC adaptor. This cell phone has no camera, and is not a color screen so she can’t look at pictures on it. I tried sending her text messages, not only did she refuse to pay like $5 bucks for unlimited texts in and out she freaked the fuck out because me sending her a text cost 10 cents and spent days on the phone with the cell company getting them to not only lock off txts to her account but get the 10 cents back.:smack: Nothing I said mattered.
I call her on Skype and have to SCREAM for her to hear me, she refuses to entertain the notion she is hard of hearing, our discussions involve me having to repeat myself 3 or 4 times for basic one word responses, for more detailed or involved stuff I often just give up and tell her nevermind.
I have to go print digital photos of my son at the pharmacy to mail them to her, any attempt to get her set up to view them via email or internet just gets complaints about hating computers etc. She refuses to let me walk her through using it. Giving her info like an address or something is an exercise in futility that lasts the better part of thirty minutes.
How the hell do I get my mom to use a damn phone that can at least view photos.
She’s not going to do what she doesn’t feel comfortable with. You can’t force her to learn things that she finds frightening, intimidating, frustrating, or incomprehensible. You may just have to accept that she’s never going to use the phone or the internet in the way you’d like.
If skyping with her is driving you crazy, maybe you should just get her a regular old land line, with a handset that’s tethered to the rest of the phone with a regular old curly telephone wire. Those setups are super simple, you don’t have to charge them, and it’s impossible to lose the phone by putting it down in the wrong place. You’ll have to call her with your phone, and you won’t get video, but at least you’ll get good voice quality.
If you give up the struggle to get her to do things the way you want her to do them, it may be a lot more peaceful for you. Yes, it sucks that she won’t see her grandson on video, but it might be best to rely on snail-mailing her photos.
Why can’t she see your son in person? Is there any way you and your son could travel to see her, if she can’t come to you?
How the hell does your mom get you to call her and mail her a few pictures?
Really, why should your mom change just to make your life easier? If you want to send her pictures, stick a stamp on an envelope, and she will see them soon. Or if you are in the US, have them print out at a Walgreens near to her, and she can go pick them up in a couple of hours.
At 75, your mom has gone through a heck of a lot of changes in her life. She has decided that she’s happy with where she is. It’s time for you to accept and honor that.
1.Landline or cell or Skype it doesn’t make a difference, she is just hard of hearing.
2.She is always asking for pictures of my son, I’ve tried to impress on her how much easier it would be going digital.
3.She not only wastes a good portion of her day fighting with businesses who want to charge her for mailing a paper invoice or bill, she also wastes mine asking for help. A lot of businesses now either stop sending her paper invoices or bills, or they want to charge an outrageous amount for it which she refuses to pay so she has to call in and fuss at them until they take it off the bill, rinse and repeat next month. This is a big waste of time, ditto dealing with everything from doctors to lawyers.
4.She is actually paying more money for voice only service on a decade old cell phone than she would be for a new pre paid phone with unlimited everything. She is currently paying $70 dollars a month:smack:
Repeat what Tastes of Chcolate said. None of the reasons you give to change matter, she ain’t gonna do it. Period stop, end of that conversation. You will literally make yourself crazy if you keep trying to fight it.
You (yes, you) are going to have to find ways to work with it. For instance, is it possible that she is willing to add you to her bank account, so that you can pay her bills for her, online? Is she willing to make you her health care/legal proxy, so you can talk to doctors and lawyers for her?
Like Scribble said, since she’s using what is essentially a tethered phone now, why not get her a regular old land-line phone. She’ll be more comfortable with it anyway, and it can be had for much cheaper.
Then getting her to use the internet won’t help.
Is the old cell phone her only phone? If she still has a landline, buy her a phone with a volume control.
I guess she’s not impressed. Snail mail her a picture.
Be a good son, log in for her and print out her bills and mail them to her.
That is appalling unless she is spending thousands of minutes on the phone. But she really doesn’t need a new smart phone in order to switch to a prepaid service. If she is currently using Verizon, switch her over to PagePlus – same phone, still operates on Verizon network.
Also keep in mind that a lot of old people have genuine physical problems using smart phones. They have trouble hitting the touch screen buttons, seeing the screen and the little icons (especially in bright daylight), swiping, and moving objects around on the screen. They need a simple phone with large, easy-to-hit buttons and no complicated finger movements.
So far the consensus is…Be nice to your mother. Don’t ask her to conform to modern 21st century technology. Back up and conform to hers. I bet she’d really appreciate a handwritten letter w/some photos showing up in her mailbox.
Do it for her. She’s your mother.
Consider a tablet computer w/cell services that has been configured for her use to have desktop icons that she can just hit. E.g. an icon that takes her to your facebook page. An icon that takes her to her “pay electric bill” page.
Set up the tablet so that when she’s done or gets lost, all she has to do is turn it off/on and it goes back to the desktop.
Look in her local community for a senior specific intro to computers class or an instructor to visit with her a couple times.
Set up an icon to search youtube for cute kitten videos… that may give her incentive to keep using the tablet.
Set it up with a book reading application. Kindle is a free app (books are not always free) and it has great usability features like ability to set background color and set type size.
Setup the tablet to allow remote management and create an account for yourself so you can log on and ‘fix’ stuff if needed. You can also log on and ‘use’ the tablet while she watches what you do.
The icons I would set up on the tablet:
Youtube kitties
Kindle books (also a link to the top sellers list on Amazon)
Your picture site (flicker… whatever you use )
A folder called “bills” and inside that folder a link for each bill that she needs to pay
Email (or better yet, create her a Facebook account that you friend. Then all she has to do is type in the status space and you’ll be able to see it.)
If she won’t change the battery in her cell phone and has never even turned on her PC, I strongly doubt she would be open to even that, especially with the OP apparently unable to show/help her in person.
Some elderly just aren’t going to learn new technology. Before he died a few years ago, I did know a man in his 80s who was Internet-savvy. He was a friend’s father and would correspond with me by e-mail quite often. But I think he’s the exception. I know an American here whose elderly mother won’t have anything to do with those new-fangled cellphones, she still has her landline. But she won’t ever call her son, he has to call her always, because, as he told me she said, “I’m not going to dial all those numbers.” I mean, hey, what can you do?
I think oldies not having a cell phone is pretty normal. My mother has one that she keeps in a drawer, switched off, even though we bought it for her to carry in the car in case of emergencies. Whenever I call my folks from my mobile, they insist on calling me back as ‘this call must be costing you a fortune’, even though I have an unlimited calls plan.
To be fair, my mum (86) has done a computer course. She has a certificate!
As far as the pictures go, get her a digital picture frame. There are ones that can be synced to a Flickr\Facebook\etc. account, so you’d only have to set it up once.
I understand your frustration. We live on the other side of the world to both sets of parents - my parents have embraced the technology and I email them every other day.
My husband’s parents are both quite capable of using a computer (which might put them above your mother) but won’t. I have never had a response to any email I have sent them. Then the times that we phone them, they complain that they never hear from us. sigh
Mom’s about that age and she uses the internet, but she worked at a job that used computers and internet pretty early on, so she was introduced to it that way.
I think it would be almost impossible to get her to start if she didn’t want to.
I came to it pretty late myself and only because of A) my job and B) a younger wife and a kid who dragged me into the world of new technology.
Find a teenager in the neighborhood who will come over and do the “technical” stuff when she’s Skyping with you (i.e., setting up the session). An hour or two a week to download her emails, print out her grandchild’s photos and/or take them to the drug store on a disc and have them made into glossies, delete the spam, put your emails in a Word doc and enlarge the text so she can read them, whatever. Might cost you, what, $25 a week? Will give a kid something to do, your mom a little company and security that the computer’s not going to blow up.