I typically shy away from telling you exactly what to do, especially if you are a parent. The primary reason is that every situation is unique and I cannot confidently speak specifically to your situation. Because of this I do not want to put an expectation on you that is unattainable and in turn becomes a burden. For example, I am in a unique situation where I work where my kids go to school. I or my wife coaches their youth sports, my wife works for our church and is typcially at camp/events with them, and we live less than 10 minutes from the school. Because of this, my kids do not have phones. While I do believe in general kids get phones and social media access far too early, I cannot make a blanket statement to say you should not give them one because you may have to work long hours, are in a split custody situation, or have other extenuating circumstances.
What I am more than happy to do though is reframe how we view technology’s place in our children’s lives to make it easier for us to make difficult(or at least unpopular decisions) when it comes to how to set boundaries and if necessary enact consequences when it comes to our children’s technology access and behavior.
The importance of this came to my attention as I was having a recurring conversation with parents. We would talk about the struggles with technology and setting limits and it would typically end in one of two ways. “How can I expect them to have self-control when I cannot control myself?” , or “But that is where their socialization happens.” Both of these are valid concerns. My answer to these though is parenting and being a child(at whatever stage of life) has not changed, the party just moved online.
When you were growing up back in the day and you wanted to go to someone’s house, especially if the label party was put on there or it was a sleepover, you likely had the shared experience we all had. “Will their parents be there?” “What will you be doing?” “What time will you be home?” These questions were designed to keep us safe and out of trouble whether we thought they were fair or not. The difference between our generation though is that instead of trying to go somewhere else to get into trouble or “have a little fun”, teens now go online. But instead of being overwhelmed like this is a new parenting challenge and there is nothing we can do, instead let’s use the old strategies as a guide in protecting our kids online.
- Make sure there is a parent there: Install both monitoring and filtering software on your kids devices and if possible your home network. Monitoring allows you to see what they are doing. Filtering blocks them from doing or seeing things you do not want them to see or do. Both are important because not only do they better protect your kid, but also kids(at every age) are always looking for and finding ways to get around whatever protections you put in place. So having every line of defense possible in place is vital. Another line of defense is random device checks. This should include but does not have to be limited to reading messages, checking browser history, looking for gaps in message/browser history that indicate something might have been deleted, and looking for apps you do not recognize. This is because unknown apps are often VPN’s or other tools that allow kids to get around the protections you put in place. It may seem like an invasion of privacy for some of you, but we have to realize that we are dealing with something that creates the possiblity of dangers to our children’s physical, mental, and social-emotional well-being like we have never seen before. So I would say we cannot do enough to protect them.
- Know what they are doing: Communicate clear guidelines of what your child should or should not be doing online. This may seem obvious but there is a layer to this that may not be. Do you remember when Napster came out? It was this new thing and we were all doing it. Because if it is free and we have access to it how could it be wrong? Well we later figured out it was stealing. Maybe we knew from the beginning, but regardless we continued to do it because it was free and at our fingertips. The whole Internet is Napster and our children often believe if they can get it to it then it must be okay. This can have serious consequences. For example, we had a kid visit a DDOS (Distributed Denial-of-service) attack. This is a cyber attack that shuts down a network. This is also a federal crime. All he wanted to do was prank his friends and bump them off of their network(Boost them) while playing Call of Duty. He did not know how to do it, but when he searched the term, the first site that came up was a Russian site where you can pay a very small fee for all kinds of illegal cyber attacks. This is what the Internet has become. A kid can accidentally commit a federal crime without even knowing it, going on the dark web, or going past the first search result on Google. So we need to set expectations for our kids of what they can and cannot do online and continue to do so as they enter new stages of life and new sites, softwares, and trends develop.
- Give them a time to be “home”: Basically, set a device curfew. You can do this with software or just physically take the device at a certain time. Yes, you do not want your child accessing things at night while they are unsupervised that they should not be. But more importantly, they just need the break. This will be difficult because they do not realize they need a break. For us, we have a baseline that tells us something is off physically, emotionally or mentally because we lived a life without technology. But they never have. This is all they know. So we are going to have to create these breaks for them so that they can experience moments of rest without technology and in turn better decide the relationship they want to have with their technology.
Technology is new and can seem scary. But it does not mean that the responsibilities and strategies of parents have to change. The party is still going just as it was when we were kids. It just moved online. Protect your kid from the dangers of the party or maybe just tell them they cannot go to the party at all.