In the last few months my students from ENSAD and I have been doing interviews with people who have relatives and family abroad. I wanted to study how communication patterns of transnational families were changing thanks to services like Skype. The vagaries of recruiting people led us to have a mix of households, some with very significant and recent ties with people in distant countries and some who simply came from families who had migrated to Europe many years ago. With my student Elena Angel we also did some interviews of people living in hostels in London and who were therefore planning to spend just a few months away from home. I expected many surprises from these interviews as I always do, but still I was blown away by how much communication is going on between adults and their mothers.
Regardless of the distance, some mothers lived in the same city, we found that the most frequent, regular and lengthy calls these adults were doing, were systematically with their mothers. The people we interviewed ranged from the age of 25 to 55 and we talked to men and women some living alone and others with partners and children. Their professions were also different, we talked to students, job seekers, nurses, translators, bank clerks and shop assistants. Most of them lived in France and some in the UK, they were originally from Algeria, Lebanon, Spain, Colombia, Romania and France.
The conversations with their mothers were all oral and were done either on the landline or on skype, rarely on the mobile phone. Everyone mentioned a regular pattern of call which was either daily or weekly. Women seemed to be calling on a daily basis and men weekly or biweekly. The mothers were sometimes active professionally and sometimes retired. Fathers were mentioned much less frequently and conversations with them often were a by-effect of talking to the mothers, on Skype for instance they would say hello when passing by the webcam.
These regular and relatively long conversations were usually carried out at home often in the evening and had no specific topic. One woman told us she and her mother would just go through everything that happened that day down to the detail of what they had for lunch. In some cases where families were used to using Skype with a webcam, the conversations could last a couple of hours and on both sides the households would go on their evening tasks, cooking, doing homework chatting. One young woman studying in France put on the webcam every evening and so did her parents in her home abroad and they would just go on with their usual activities which for her meant studying and her parents watching TV and chatting. Another professional woman said that she would call her mother every evening and her father every morning since they had divorced just to see how they were feeling.
Many people mentioned a great sense of responsibility towards their ageing mothers and felt that these regular conversations allowed them to see how well their mothers were doing and to somehow reduce their fear of losing their parents while they were distant. It is a recurring theme in people who have migrated far away and who only return to see their parents sporadically, that their parents may die while they are not there. However, even the adults we interviewed who lived in the same city or region as their mothers and therefore were seeing them more regularly, said they called them very frequently.
Interestingly some participants mentioned that they spoke with their mothers and parents more and better, since they were far than when they were together under the same roof. They mentioned that often the relationship had improved since it was distant and mediated by a phone. This honest comment is very interesting because it seems to reflect the majority of relationships maintained through a digital channel. The calls, although they have significantly increased in length and frequency since the reduction of international prices, seem to reinforce the most positive part of the relationship. In distance most people seem to be looking for the comfort the exchange can give them and avoid conflicts.
In another paper in this website I have mentioned my hypothesis that mediated communication is a way of handling anxiety and that making contact with a loved one even briefly is a way of feeling comforted. I tried to show how a call or text seems to slot in within a cycle of anxiety reduction as it was described by Bowlby.
I was therefore particularly interested in reading the account of a research published May 11 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The research showed how a phone call to their mothers, had the same comforting effect on some young girls engaged in a stressful activity, as a physical contact.
The following account of the experiment was reported by the Scientific American : Seltzer and her colleagues had 61 seven- to 12-year-old girls perform math and public-speaking tasks in front of an audience of strangers. (These are frequently employed stress tests for children.) Afterward, 19 girls were turned back over to their mothers, who gave comfort for 15 minutes, in part through reassuring physical contact with the girls. Alternatively, 20 of the girls received a 15-minute-long call from their mothers on a phone provided by the researchers. The remaining 22 girls watched an emotionally neutral movie for 75 minutes. (The two other groups also were shown 60 minutes of the same neutral movie after their 15 minutes of maternal contact.) To test levels of the stress hormone cortisol, samples of spit were collected seven times over the course of the experiment, and levels of oxytocin were monitored through four urine samples that were collected. This description of the hormonal effects of mediated communication seems highly compatible with the phenomena we are encountering in our interviews. There are a variety of reasons that make adults call their mothers regularly but the notions of anxiety and comfort are always mentioned in a way or another.
The researchers found that "the children who got to interact with their mothers had virtually the same hormonal response, whether they interacted in person or over the phone," Seltzer said. By the end of the experiment, those girls who had spoken with their mothers over the phone had about the same levels of cortisol as those who had met with their mothers in person (though the phone group's levels took longer to arrive at that lower level). Both of these groups had much less cortisol in their saliva than those who had had no contact with their mothers after the stressful endeavor.
The effect of talking to Mom was even more dramatic when assessed via subjects' levels of oxytocin. "Girls released conspicuously similar levels" of the bonding hormone whether they had spoken with their mothers or had physical contact with them by the end of the session, Seltzer and her team found. (The girls who did not have contact with their mothers after the stress event had consistent, lower levels of oxytocin.)