Raising Humans in a Digital World

Do you have questions about online safety? Do you want to help your students build a healthy relationship with technology?

ParentWiser invited Diana Graber to deftly navigate and demystify the complicated digital landscape facing today’s kids. She did so by defining buzzwords, answering crucial questions, and providing parents and educators with activities they can use to teach their children to harness technology rather than be harmed by it.

Diana started the lecture by stating that kids are being socialized really differently than ever before:

• Asynchronous (not happening at the same time): A text chain started today may last a whole week.

• Everything they do is permanent and public: A girl might think it’s cute today but could be embarrassed ten years later.

• 24/7 availability: The kids feel like they have to be on all the time, which causes a lot of anxiety with lots of kids.

• Absence of social cues: It is hard for kids to understand what they are trying to tell each other without facial expressions and tone of voice.

• Quantifiable (#’s of likes, etc.): Everything they do is counted by likes and the number of followers.

• Visual: Friends are super visual with all of the things that they do.

• Algorithmic: Algorithms largely decide what the kids see and what they like.

How do we raise kids who have a healthy relationship with technology?

Raising a kid today is like building a house: Having a strong foundation of Social/ Emotional Skills and building upon it with the structure of reputation, screen time, relationships, and privacy.

Building a strong foundation of Social/ Emotional Skills is really important because kids will really need these as they get older and go online: Face-to-face interactions, hands-on exploration, and interaction with nature. Kids thrive when they are read to, talked to, or played with. Research shows the negative impact of technology on young children. Studies also show a 40% decline in empathy among college students after 2000 as online messaging platforms, chat rooms, and, eventually, social media emerged.

How to prepare kids for a world full of screens?

Screen time has doubled during the pandemic to nearly 8 hours per day, which does not include time spent on screens for remote learning or schoolwork. During the pandemic, youth needed technology for their schoolwork and to maintain connections with family and friends. Research shows that social media and video games provided temporary relief from real life and offered important opportunities for social engagement. “Goldilocks Hypothesis” research shows that there’s a point between low and high use of technology that is “just right” for teens when their sense of well-being is boosted. They suggest screen time for weekdays should be limited to 1 hour 40 minutes for video game play and 1 hour 57 minutes for smartphone use. On the weekend, the limit was 3 hours 35 minutes for playing video games and for watching videos, 4 hours 50 minutes.

What parents can do is educate our youth on how to use technology well. Our youth need time to make sense of a complex digital world. Some ways to let students think deeply about screen time:

• Think about how many hours have been used on screen time and help kids consider how they spend their “time.” Stop measuring by “how much?” Instead, ask: “For what purpose are you using the screen?” Share examples of ways they have created, shared, or participated in using digital media.

• Negotiate a Tech Agreement with each child. It will be different based on the child’s age. Have a discussion with your child and come to an agreement. Rephrase or re-implement the agreement, if necessary, based on each child.

• Teach kids about digital reputations: Everything they post online stays online forever. It can be searched for and viewed by vast, invisible audiences. Others can share what the child posts, and there’s no “oops” key on the internet! Do not lecture kids about their online world or have one-time assemblies or use a fearbased approach.

• Make a bucket list of non-screen activities. Take a 24-hour “Screen-Free” vacation.

• At the same time, parents need to be a ROLE MODEL for screen time use.

Parents need to know teens are not “addicted” to technology; they are addicted to each other. Diana shared problems and safety tips for parents to pay attention to and know how to appropriately use YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, and online games (Please check her full lecture for the details).

All the above social media apps lead to the question of privacy and personal information on the internet. Children’s privacy is their currency, but all the social media apps and the things they use, even for school, are collecting their personal information. The existing law (COPPA – Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act) protects the privacy and personal information of children under the age of 13. This means that sites and apps must get parental consent in order to collect the personal information of children under 13. But kids use these apps earlier by lying about their age which is easy to do when they put in a fake birthday to open accounts. When they do so, they are not protected by this important law. Another important thing about privacy is that even if students set their account to private, their bio and pictures will never be private; it will always be public by default. Kids do care about their privacy as they grow older. Teens do not want to leave a bad impression that could hurt college or job prospects. They worry they may be photographed at any moment by friends, classmates, or even strangers, and their images may be being taken and shared out of context or used to generate a viral “meme.” They also worried about “doxxing,” when someone posts sensitive information online about another with the intent of stirring up trouble. All these create a lot of anxiety for the kids today.

At the end of the lecture, Diana listed three things that parents can do right now:

• Respect age requirements: Nearly every social media site requires kids to be at least 13. It takes about 13 years of life to develop ethical thinking skills, and online interactions require ethical thinking. Remember that age-gating does not work when real age is not given.

• To be a parent, be like a dolphin: Be firm, flexible, curious, and playful.

• Educate yourself and your kids: When students engage in hands-on activities and discussions about digital life together, it empowers them to maintain a balance between real life and screen life, to protect themselves and each other, and to create change.

To learn more from Diana Graber’s full lecture regarding “Raising Humans in a Digital World”, please visit the ParentWiser website (https://www.parentwiser. org/). Parents can also check out www. cybercivics.com to learn more about their curriculum on helping kids build a healthy relationship with technology. Visit www.cyberwise.org and subscribe to the newsletter.

Diana Graber is the author of “Raising Humans in a Digital World: Helping Kids Build a Healthy Relationship with Technology.” She co-founded CyberWise.org and founded CyberCivics. com, two organizations dedicated to helping adults and students learn digital citizenship and literacy skills. A long-time media producer with an M.A. in “Media Psychology & Social Change,” Graber is a recognized expert on technology’s impact on human behavior.