How to help family members embrace unfamiliar technology — at any age

Chances are, you found it a tiny bit frustrating to spend hours talking through something that you easily could have done in seconds.

I say this from my own experience. Early in the pandemic, I talked my 81-year-old mother through installing and using Zoom so she could join in a weekly familywide chat.

But the real challenge came with helping her set up an Apple TV from 3,000 miles away.

What would’ve taken five minutes in person instead required a week’s worth of phone calls and ultimately, a FaceTime encounter with the back of her TV.

The good news is that getting a Boomer on Zoom can not only be stress-free, but also life-enriching and empowering, if you take the right approach.

Here are some things to keep in mind for an effective remote tech help strategy.

Cini says the result is the fear that an errant button push will render the piece of technology totally useless. That’s why it’s important to underscore often that nothing they do to today’s tech gadgets will result in irreversible damage.

That’s echoed by Alex Glazebrook, director of operations for Older Adults Technology Services (OATS), a nonprofit that helps seniors make the most of the technology around them.

“(Telling them) ‘You can’t break it’ is where we start from,” he says.

“We try to really calm people’s nerves and try to make them feel like they’re in control, that they can do this.”

“Simple things like ‘swipe left,’ ‘swipe right’ or ‘click on the hamburger (icon)’ that they don’t even have the capacity to understand.”

Glazebrook says approaching new technology like foreign-language learning is helpful because both are about adding to a knowledge base piece by piece over time.

“When you learn a language, it builds,” he says. “You learn nouns, you learn verbs, conjugation and then sentence structure, you build complexity.”

Glazebrook says that at the beginning of the pandemic, the most requested assistance was with connecting via video.

Cini points out that of all the tech skills to master, Zoom has an additional upside.

“Video chats are really important,” she says. “You can see their facial expressions, you can see if they’ve lost weight.”

“And we know, scientifically, it’s very hard not to smile when someone else is smiling,” she adds. “So we have the ability to increase somebody else’s happiness just by doing a (video chat) instead of a phone call.”