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Smartphones Part 2
12-24-2017
Teens, and even younger children, love their phones and other electronic devices. They turn to them when they’re feeling bored, lonely, or lazy. They also grab their phones when they’re excited, happy, or curious. Anytime is tech time. Never before have teens had so much unsupervised access to friends and society. Their smartphones allow them to roam freely and connect with others from the comfort, and perceived safety, of their own bedroom.
It would take several columns to fully discuss all the negative impacts that smartphones have on todays’ teens and younger children. We have all heard disturbing stories about incredibly mean and merciless online behaviour - swearing, insulting, shaming, threatening, sharing inappropriate photos, encouraging each other to engage in foolish or risky acts including watching indecent and/or violent content, and cyberbullying, which at its worse can push a person towards suicide. Our own children have most likely been involved in a constant shuffle of being an aggressor, victim, or witness in major and minor ways in many of these scenarios. Without a doubt, bad things happen online.
But good things happen too. Our phones are passports to the world. We can learn about ancient civilizations, watch local and global real-time current events, read great literature, tour famous museum and galleries, study advance mathematics, witness marvels of science, learn skills and crafts, improve our physical and personal development, see the light side of life, and connect to family, friends, and strangers who become friends, without leaving home.
The online world mirrors the real world. Our role as parents is no different online than in real life. We raise our teens to be smart and empathetic people who contribute to the good of society. As parents, we show and explain the world - gradually increasing our child’s understanding until they reach maturity. We guide, advise, and mentor. We create opportunities, set rules, and protect. We are parents - the noun, but we also parent - the verb.
For the most part, we learnt how to be a parent through our own parents - modelling what they taught or doing the opposite. When it comes to the online world, we have no role models. We didn’t experience that world ourselves and we didn’t see how our parents handled various situations, so we we’re left to figure it out ourselves.
It’s helpful to tie the way we parent in the online world back to exactly how we parent in the real world. If you feel your child is not mature enough to get on a bus, ride to the mall, and spend a few hours hanging out with friends, then they probably aren’t ready for unaccompanied online adventures either. Therefore, it would be reasonable to set a rule that they can use devices only where they can be seen, such as in the living room instead of the bedroom. If you are comfortable with them going out on their own during the day but you expect them to be home by nightfall, then a procedure of phones being left outside of bedrooms at night is practical. Similarly, just as you have face to face expectations as to what type of language they use, what shows they can watch, and how much time they spend in various activities, you set boundaries in the virtual world and monitor their activity.
Research shows teens who have parents who walk along with them in the online world, pointing out wonders and dangers, just like they would in the real world, have healthier relationships to technology than teens who were either let loose to explore the online world by themselves or those who had access too tightly controlled. In fact, shielding teens from the Internet is as dangerously naive as handing them a device without any moral instructions.
Our job as parents is to teach our children how to use good judgment and live their values in every aspect of life. Talk with your teens about technology, try out the apps they love, learn the clever meanings of the plethora of acronyms, emojis, and memes, play their favourite games with them, share your own best-loved sites. Let them see you model healthy, appropriate, and balanced use of technology. The phones are smart, so parents can’t be dumb. The world is wide and it now includes an online piece that is new, but parenting is old. As parents have done for eons, walk side by side with your teen: point out the beauty, warn about the dangers, discuss the richness of life, and help them develop their own discernment so that one day, they can be smart parents too.
Zainab Dhanani can be reached at z_dhanani@yahoo.ca
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