I didn't know this on January 31, 2007, but most of my patients did. Here we were, staring out the window of the hospital at snarled traffic, eerie bomb squads, FBI agents and stopped trains, and one of my patients waltzes in and says "Dude, its Aqua Teen Hunger Force. It's a F-king TV show. Chill."

"You're kidding," I said. "There are guys out there removing those things with special robots. I saw it on CNN.com."

"Don't look there," he complained. He seemed genuinely disappointed in me, and with a few quick key strokes he brought my computer to a number of underground web sites where the stunt was clearly advertised and had been so for some time. Apparently none of the guys in space suits under the bridges had asked a 14-year-old kid what was going on.

The term digital immigrant is often used to describe the Luddites among us who were born before 1990. We didn't grow up with this stuff. It's no secret that we are, as a rule, not very good at using technology, at judging the technology, and at innovating with technology. Just yesterday my Droid cell phone got stuck and my 11-year-old fixed it without even glancing at a manual. It just intuitively made sense to her. I thought of Elton John's Rocket Man, and even hummed a few bars while she fiddled with my phone.

"All this science, I don't understand...it's just my job five days a week."

I asked her if she knew the song.

"Sure," she said. "They sang it on American Idol."

Sigh.

Despair.

What is left to teach my kids that they can't access better and more efficiently? They know my music from YouTube, they can tease out bomb-threats from advertising, they can fix my phone with about as much focus as it takes me to brush my teeth. To paraphrase a question I am asked professionally about 20 times a week: "What the hell do we do about all this technology? Is it good for my kid?"

My answer to that question is usually that this is the wrong question to ask. We can't really do anything about the technology itself--it's here to stay. The relentless tide of the digital world will not abate, and I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing.

What I do think is that all this technology can scare us so much, can seem so foreign to parents and so potentially divisive to families, that we forget the fundamental differences between our parental adult brains and our younger kids' brains.

There is debate as to whether new technologies are changing brain development in kids, and the jury is out so far on that fascinating question. Nevertheless, we adults are still wired to think more carefully, with more nuance, and with greater and more admirable judgment than kids. This isn't meant to insult our children. It's just biology. We can reason through things with much greater dexterity than our children, and what we can teach them, then, is now more important than ever.

We can teach our children that information does not equal wisdom. Acquisition of content does not equal careful consideration. Was it OK for advertising executives to do their stunt under the Boston bridges back on January 31, 2007? Was it OK that they didn't inform anyone? Why? Why not? I'm not necessarily taking a stand. I am simply trying to get kids to think further when they mistake answers for thinking in the first place.

The internet, when used correctly, can help us guide our kids to exercise the most important capacity we enjoy as humans--the willingness, even the craving, I'd argue, to ask the next question. It's not enough, nor is it nearly as enjoyable, to know a few lyrics to Rocket Man. That's like saying Shakespeare wrote Lear, but knowing nothing about Shakespeare or Lear other than the connection.

I went back to the internet and read about Rocket Man. Reportedly, Elton John's long time collaborator Bernie Taupin tipped his hat to both David Bowie's Space Oddity and Ray Bradbury's short story, also called Rocket Man. Taupin, Bowie and Bradbury's work all carry the central theme of the extraordinary becoming ordinary. Going to space, for goodness sakes, could someday become something that you just pack your bags and do. And the song is sad, with a kind of melancholic longing for things to matter again, for things to be wondrous. Ray Bradbury celebrated the experience of wonder as beautifully as any author of the last century.

So, let's not let our technology steal our wonder. Don't stop with simple answers that appear in headlines on a Google search. If anything, there is a greater threat to the development of our kids' brains by our willingness to cede the prowess of careful thought for the encyclopedic access that the internet affords. If we can use this technology to foster inquiry, and also step away from it and think together, then we're back on solid parenting ground. And we also might get lucky and learn how to work our smart phones while we're at it.

          Steve Schlozman's first novel, The Zombie Autopsies, was published in March.