Several years ago I uploaded a post, Advice from Digital Kids to Parents, including some of the thoughts that kids in grades 3-6 shared with me about adults’ digital activities. My students often commented that it was unfair when parents asked their kids to sign a digital life contract or agreement, because adults then proceeded to break many of the common sense rules.
The comments of my former students ring true today, especially when I see parents and kids together on a walk or at the park for a fair amount of time and parents look down most of the time at their phones.
It was so much easier when we shared in photo albums!
I’ve often written about sharenting — defined as digital age parents sharing their 21st Century kids’ photos, stories, and information via Facebook, blogs, and other public online social media.
If you are mulling over the sharenting topic and want more guidance and perspective, take a few minutes to read a just-published article over at Sonya Livingstone’s Parenting for a Digital Future blog. The article, written by Alicia Blum-Ross, Where and When Does a Parent’s Right to Share End Online?, discusses the ways that bloggers who are also parents think about sharing information online and the “digital dilemma” that they experience. Blum-Ross also explores how these parents consider the future that their children will experience while growing up and examining the digital information about themselves.
Our traditional expectations for civility and ethical behavior are cracking apart right before our eyes.
On the basis of what’s happened at recent political conventions and the beginning of the election season, young people will be witnessing name-calling, stereotyping, hateful comments, online hate, and in some cases veiled bodily threats. Kids will hear things on TV at home and on the televisions that are broadcasting in lounges, waiting rooms, doctor’s offices, and everywhere else. They will hear radios broadcasting the news at home and in other peoples’ homes. And, of course, there’s social media.
Take a few minutes to read What’s the Right Age for a Child to Get a Smartphone? by Brian X Chen. The July 20, 2016 New York Times article includes interviews with Internet Safety experts and contains some advice from other parents.
Whenever I have conversations about the challenges of digital parenting, people invariably ask how I might condense all of the 21st Century parenting guidance into just a few helpful suggestions.
Can you get it down to the three most important tips, I’m asked?
I’ll admit that I’ve tried, on one than one occasion, to identify and condense the many elements that combine to strengthen digital world parenting skills, but the challenge takes an enormous amount of thought and even more time. Moreover, any short and succinct advice has to make it clear that we parents can no longer think about living our lives in two parts — digital and non-digital. If tips are distilled down to the basics, they still need to help adults recognize that our world changes constantly, and also that it requires us to continually learn from our children — refining our parenting strategies as we go along.
The good news is that one of my colleagues, Craig Luntz at the Calvert School in Baltimore, has come up with a three-part framework to help families navigate through changing expectations in the 21st Century world. When he works with parents at his school Craig offers the following three-part digital parenting plan. Continue reading “Three Basic — and Best — Digital Parenting Guidelines”→
Check out helpful links for parents are at the end of this column.
We are all still reeling from the explosions at the finish line of the Boston Marathon.
For parents of digital kids, who with their children take all-the-time media access for granted, the greatest challenge is to figure out how to moderate what their youngsters see and hear in the days immediately following an event. It’s especially difficult because adults often want to be updated continuously by media resources.
Here’s a Boston Globe article with suggestions about how parents can help children feel safer and more secure after frightening events. Written by pediatrician Claire McCarthy for her MD Mama column, the piece also offers links to additional resources on parenting after scary, media-saturated events. Dr. McCarthy reminds parents that they can get their updates from smartphones and laptops rather than keeping a radio or television turned on.
This graphic links to the MGH article.
Best Quote
“…as parents, we don’t get the luxury of processing and dealing separately from our children.”
I love my iPhone and iPad, and I cannot do many things without them. For children under 13, however, use time should be carefully monitored by each family. Kids today are playing independently with powerful devices, and they — the devices and the children — are not intended to interact in isolation and for long periods without adult supervision.
Just today I asked a group of device-savvy fifth graders, most around age 10, if they know anything about SnapChat, the app that deletes pictures in one to ten seconds (leaving plenty of time for a recipient with poor judgment to take a screenshot and save the photo). Just about every hand went up. During a lesson a few months ago I asked them how many of them know how to make a screenshot — and they can all do it in a lot less than ten seconds. Read my SnapChat review here.
Take a few minutes to read 
Media! Tech! Parenting! 
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