Sentenced to a cell(phone)

Ms. Chesley frames the issue this way: "What are the norms in your workplace about getting calls on your cellphone after hours? Who provides the technology? Is it your cellphone or your employer's? Are individuals buying these themselves, wanting to be accessible to an employer? That has huge implications for family life. The social norms we're developing are really targeted toward increasing access, not toward denying access."

The problem of boundaries became evident to Christena Nippert-Eng when she took her children to a museum. A father was on his cellphone discussing business for several hours. Every time his child would say, "Oh Dad, look at this!" the man would motion that he was busy.

"Families are going to have to step up and address those issues," says Professor Nippert-Eng, a sociologist at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. "Kids often don't have a lot of power to force their parents' attention on them."

That lack of attention, whatever the reason, can have serious consequences. Nippert-Eng points to out-of-control children on reality shows such as "Supernanny" and "Nanny 911" as warning signs. "Children are starting to engage in very destructive behaviors to demand parents' attention," she says.

As a publicist at Pace University in Pleasantville, N.Y., Cara Halstead Cea must be available by cellphone around the clock. Although reporters and professors sometimes call during family gatherings or her son's baseball games, she finds a bright side.

"The phone affords me flexibility that I would not otherwise have," she says. "If I need to take an extra hour or two for personal business during the week, I - and my bosses - have the peace of mind of knowing that I can be reached if I am needed."

But sociologist Chesley offers a caution about such trade-offs. "This 24/7 access may be a high price to pay for getting a little bit of flexibility at the workplace - to get an hour off from your workday to take your kid to an after-school program, or whatever it is you're doing."

While praising electronic tools for helping people to lead productive lives, Jeff Kaye, CEO of an international recruiting firm in Dallas, also sees a downside. "We've become multitaskers," he says. "I can play with my kids while checking e-mail. But rather than becoming more effective, we're losing our ability to concentrate and focus. You do two things with average effectiveness, as opposed to doing one thing with superior effectiveness and then moving on to the second task. How much time did we actually save?"

Round-the-clock connections offer other challenges for Patricia Baronowski of New York, who works in investor relations with international clients.

"I used to keep my BlackBerry on vibrate, which was causing a little tension at home since it was buzzing throughout the night," she says. Now she checks it before she goes to bed and when she wakes up. Clients and her employer know that if something is critical they can phone.

Ultimately, Nippert-Eng says, users of cellphones and pagers must speak up about the challenges they face. "Employers, employees, and family members have to be willing to address boundary issues, sometimes in very confrontational ways. Workers might have to say, 'I'm just not going to answer this cellphone.' "

Even these devices themselves can be part of the solution, says Larry McCallum, a family life professor at Augustana College in Rock Island, Ill. "The real advantage of the newer technology is that, for the most part, it allows me to control most of the negative factors. Most cellphones have caller ID, so I can decide whether to answer a particular call. My father once told me, 'The phone doesn't care whether it gets answered.' The beauty of the system is in the hands of the user."

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