Should I Spy? by Rosalind Wiseman
“Does a parent ever have the right to check his or her child’s text/ Facebook messages?”
No, it’s called independence and there is no way they can control or sensor everything so they might as well teach how to be respectable and smart and what expectations they have for Internet use! But that’s like sneaking into a journal . . . invasion of privacy. Just talk to your kid.
—Maya, fifteen
I know a lot of parenting experts would disagree with the teen above. The standard line is parents have the right to see everything their child is doing whenever they want. I get why people say this. We want a simple answer to overwhelming or complex problems. But it doesn’t work like that. Our relationships with our children are relationships. No matter what experts or the hypervigilant parent in your neighborhood tells you, it’s actually really hard to know everything your child is doing all the time online. This is the way I think about it. Monitoring your child’s online life is not about controlling your child’s online life. It is about teaching your child to communicate online ethically and authentically. It is about creating a relationship of mutual respect with your child where they’ll tell you if something is running off the rails.
Every child is different, but in general I now believe that if your child has conducted herself according to your rules, by the end of her freshman year of high school you can allow her to have a password of her own, and you can stay out of her social networking—until and unless you see or become aware of something that makes you worry.
Contrary to the stereotype that kids don’t value privacy online, they do—intensely. They value it so much that they’ll come up with incredibly creative ways to hide in plain sight what they really feel. Even if you’re a parent who checks their social networking posts, you may look at the images they’re posting and have no idea of the meaning behind those images. You may even misinterpret the meaning of the post.
Really, teens have been doing this forever. How they choose to dress and the music they like are the most obvious ways they present themselves. But what’s important to recognize is that the way your child chooses to present herself online is extraordinarily meaningful.
Unless you are a tech security expert or a hacker (or both), you have no privacy. Neither does your daughter. From our family’s financial information to what we post online, we have all given up our privacy. But as one of my students said, just because we may not have privacy doesn’t mean it’s OK to violate people’s trust. It’s your moral responsibility to respect people’s dignity and therefore their privacy.
And all of this gets us to anonymity. We all know that being anonymous or the illusion of anonymity makes it easier for people to behave badly. The question is how do you talk to your child about it? Here’s a script:
“I know it feels like it can be anonymous online and I know that you know you really aren’t. But you shouldn’t want to be anonymous. You should stand by your words. You should be ready to own what you say in real life and what you post online.”
Or, as I like to put it regarding parents/kids and online issues: Talk, don’t stalk. – L
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45 Comments
I’m not a parent, so I have a limited right to comment on this, but I think one HARD rule should be “Don’t SAY one thing and do another”. Don’t say that your child’s posts are her business and then snoop. You WILL get caught at it, and there went any trust you had built up.
I imagined that “online” and computer stuff would be treated much like other areas. I have to monitor what my six year old does because he can’t do much, and wants to learn. As he gets more competent with the computer, we have discussions about what is and isn’t appropriate, and engage and teach him how to navigate the online world.
Much like I have to teach my kids how to cross a street, and from there teach them how to interact with the world (or run from strange people in white vans, as the case may be), the process of learning how to interact with an online world has the same pitfalls and challenges.
Eventually, we have to let go. By the time it matters, I hope that my sons will understand why a digital fingerprint is not necessarily a good thing. Luckily for me, there are lots of stories about people being reckless with their online identities, so I have lots of material to use to teach my kids “Don’t be like them.”
As much as the teen in the article equates online communications to a paper journal, the two are only superficially alike. The awkward and embarrassing thoughts and musings in the notebook under your bed are very unlikely to ever leave the safety of your bedroom. However, one ill-considered post, photo, or email can travel halfway around the world before the owner is even aware of it, and can follow that person for years to come.
With digital forms of communication, the stakes are much, much higher than with the paper journals of yore, and therefore, depending on the child, more parental oversight may be needed.
Young people consistently want to be treated as adults. One way of doing this is to introduce them early to the ‘real world rules’ of electronic devices: basically, whoever owns the device (school, work, parents) has the right to access its content and history at any time. If the consequences for misuse are clear and severe, most children will abide by the rules and hopefully grow to internalize them.
This dad’s cellphone contract with his son is a great example of that.
http://joshshipp.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/teen-cell-phone-contract.pdf
Despite the drumbeat that young people are “digital natives” or “tech-savvy”, very few know anything digital or technical about the “devices” they use.
Present them with a DOS prompt, a file structure, lines of code, or a microprocessor, and they know less than the average fast-food devoté knows about agriculture.
They point, they click, and magic happens, or so it seems to them.
Devil’s Advocate. Shouldn’t I prepare my kid for the real world? Where their bosses will monitor what they put out there on social media…what websites they are viewing at work, etc?
BL August 1, 2016 at 12:31 pm #
Despite the drumbeat that young people are “digital natives” or “tech-savvy”, very few know anything digital or technical about the “devices” they use.
That is true of the population at large. I’m not trying to be snarky, but are you trying to make a point as it relates to this article?
In this case, I’m not letting the experts tell me what to do. I may not go looking for trouble, but I’ll be spot checking. It won’t be a violation of trust because it will be a condition of being allowed access. It’s one thing to be a teen making mistakes, it’s a completely different thing to be a teen making mistakes publicly on a worldwide platform.
@TeacherJR “However, one ill-considered post, photo, or email can travel halfway around the world before the owner is even aware of it, and can follow that person for years to come.”
I don’t disagree with you fundamentally but how will having full access to your child’s social media accounts and text message prevent this from happening? What you find out will still be after the fact.
In a lot of these scenarios I fail to see where having full access to everything your child says or does to be putting on locks after the vault was robbed. If you’re not having regular conversations with your children, if you haven’t communicated your expectations for their behavior in the wider world, on social media and in general then snooping isn’t going to fix that.
The thing about social media is that it is so open that anyone can say anything at any time, with few repercussions – unless someone tells. Unless a child feels their parents should know, they won’t tell. My son had this experience already online where his class was calling him by a girls name, even after several times asking them to stop. Until I got involved and called a parent of one of those involved, who I knew well, things just kept rolling along. Do we need to check? To a point, yes.
My son is getting better about following people, saying things, and not saying things online. When he knows how to behave properly, and it may take awhile as his dyslexia precludes him from picking up on some social cues, but when it does I’ll let him fly on his own and just check in from time to time to be sure. I have his Social Networking apps installed on my phone, so he can use them at times. Which also gives me access to the alerts, and his chats, if I want to look. Two months ago I used to check them all the time, now its a couple of weeks between. He is just entering Middle School, I hope by 8th grade I no longer need to do this.
Until parents help guide their kids into this wide world where everyone, and anyone, can be a bully I think they can all use a helping hand in navigating it all. Do we need to be watching over their shoulder, no. But we shouldn’t be leaving them in the dark and groping for a light switch to figure it out.
Maybe I am lucky in that I have been involved with online communities for years, so I know how to impart some knowledge in that area. Not all kids will have parents who can do so.
“That is true of the population at large. I’m not trying to be snarky, but are you trying to make a point as it relates to this article?”
That it’s not enough for parents or children to memorize a few “real world rules”, they have to know what’s actually going on.
This is one area where I have chosen to not go with a hands off and allowing for unsupervised independence at an early age.
The argument that Facebook or other social sites is like a diary is not true. Diaries are secret, personal, and not exposed to the world. So set that argument aside.
I have raised (am still raising, as the youngest is 10) 4 girls. Our first daughter (age 30 now) went severely off the rails, starting in 7th grade and continuing until the present day due to choices she made at much to young an age, much of it influenced by friends. This was before Facebook. To all the folks who do not have a drug addict in the family, the worn phrase that one will eventually turn around when they hit rock bottom, I can only say that is a bunch of hooey. In the past eighteen months, we have seen two of her friends die from heroin overdose and our daughter put in prison. One of those friends was a lovely boy who she met and spent much time in our house starting when he was in 7th grade with her. They traveled the same path together, and he did not make it to 30.
OK, why is the above relevant to today’s article. It’s because choices made in teen age years can severely impact who one is as a person. Not having the life experience, and not knowing the addictive nature of social media, the brutality, coercion, mesmerizing attributes off it, means they have the potential to slowly, by graduated choices, get themselves into terrible situations.
So for our next daughters, two of who are now in college, and are great kids and doing well, we took a tight social media approach. In the home, I installed nanny software. The computer is not allowed in the bedroom but is in an open area. When they were young (junior high), the nanny software, and the router was setup to block as best as possible inappropriate sites. By the way, by junior hight, use of computers is pretty much mandatory for schooling, or we would not have opened up the internet to them at that age.
Social media sites were blocked at this age, chat was blocked as well. and in addition to the above, the nanny software kept a record, which I would review occasionally to see if things were fine. I would not ‘read’ their stuff, but mostly just check for sites visited. When they were in 10th grade, I opened up (most) of the blocked sites (excluding adult sites, gambling sites, and some others), but let them know they were not to create social media sites and monitoring continued.
When one of them was in 11th grade (possibly 10th, my memory is not sure) , I had to have a serious talk with one of them, as reviewing the monitoring software did show that she had sent a topless chat photo to her boyfriend. I was not mad at her, but took this as an opportunity to discuss that such indiscretion will be ou†there forever — one may think it is gone (as promised by some apps), but it is not. If her parents could see it, rest assured that others could as well. Yes, in many ways, the youth are much more informed about how to use technology (smart phones and computers), but in other ways do not fully comprehend the ramifications of such. Needless to say, she was embarrassed by the discovery, promised not to do such again, and as far as I know, did not.
As they got older, they were not allowed to have smart phones until they could earn the money to pay for such themselves. Hence, at age 16, they both got jobs, the phone being the primary motivations. Part of my having them wait so long, was to increase the likelihood to that they would be more responsible by that age, having learned at home first. Once they have a phone, then it is impossible to monitor what is done. However, there were still rules with the phone.
The number one rule, and one which really helped, is that the phone is not allowed in the bedroom at night. That is, it had to be placed on the kitchen table when they went to bed (and yes, the house had reasonable bed times). This latter was not so much about, improper use of the phone, but rather the fact that phone intrude on sleep! One needs to unplug and go to sleep without having to worry about what is going on with your friends. The only way to do this is to remove the phone from the bedroom. That was a condition of allowing them to own a phone.
The other rule is that the phone is not allowed to powered on when driving. I initially considered ‘the phone must be in the trunk when you drive’ but was talked back from that.
The last two phone rules are a minimum attempt to alleviate the addictive nature of smart phones — to at least define two times when the only way to ensure temptation is avoided is to remove it.
As mentioned, those two girls are now sophomore and junior in college. We did have a few other incidents where we had to speak up even after they were eighteen, regarding photos posted on line (not topless this time, but photos with groups of friends and lots of smoke in the air) I believe the relationship built up during high school with them helped in this conversation as well.
So now we have the 10 year old at home. She is heading into 5th grade. We have observed that other children in her class already have both smart phones and Facebook accounts! I have let her know, that in our family we do not believe in children at such a young age having such. Her older siblings (19 and 20), who she looks up to, let her know that this was the same when they were younger and that the rules are good.
Sorry for the long tale, but thought I’d share our strategy, and why. This is something really does need to be given thought. Restricting access to social media, then allowing a graduated integration as the child matures, is not anti free rang parenting at all. It’s thoughtful parenting, where we give our children the skills and guidance necessary to succeed in life.
The problem with monitoring is if kids really want to keep things incognito, they’ll simply sign up for a secret account, unknown to the parents.
I told my daughter that I reserved the right to inspect any aspect of her life, but preferred not to. I *AM* a tech security expert, so I’m pretty sure she didn’t think she could keep secrets from me if I actually took an interest in snooping, but by the time she had Internet accounts, etc., she already knew what my expectations were. She was also raised by the mantra of “there’s no trouble you can be in that you can’t make worse by lying about it.”
Silver Fang August 1, 2016 at 1:51 pm #
“The problem with monitoring is if kids really want to keep things incognito, they’ll simply sign up for a secret account, unknown to the parents.”
I think this misidentifies the role of monitoring kids use of the internet and technology to do so. This is not meant to be a replacement for parentingl, but a tool to help identify areas that may need discussed.
Regarding the technical side of the proposal that they’ll simply use an incognito or secret account, they could do so at school, at the library, at the coffee house, or at a friends house. But not at home. The router can be setup to block and record sites visited — this is done outside of the realm of the smart phone, tablet, or computer. On the computer, the nanny software records the keyboard, sites visited, and captures screen shots. This will log such activity.
One does need to take efforts to ensure nanny software is not turned off or bypassed. This is pretty obvious to see by the way.
However, I would put forth that if a child is going to such extremes, then there has been a serious break down in the parent child relationship, and a much more serious talk and change in parenting strategy is needed. Simply visiting an inappropriate site or doing something inappropriate is a chance to teach. But taking active efforts to break the house rules — -calls for something far different.
I do want bo be clear that I do not condone doing any of the above behind the childs back. That is, I fully let them know that the internet will be restricted, and if it is an issue, let me know so we can loosen that restriction, and where they visit, images they send or view, etc. will be known to their parents. None of this is done without the knowledge of the child.
I have no intention of being a prison guard, constantly having battle with inmates who may outwit me. That is not parenting. I have no desire to play games with my kids (other than board games). If one finds that an 8th grader has has broken into the liquor cabinet, one doesn’t buy a better lock to address the issue. Something much more fundamental, and more drastic needs to happen in the house.
Dear sons: If you have a facebook account I will mercilessly hack it. I will post your six month old baby pictures of you in the tub, I will put up the videos of you screaming that you want more ice cream at your third birthday, and I will link to Mom’s account of her experience with your birth. Or, you could simply avoid facebook. Choose wisely
xoxo – Dad.
I have a son starting 10th grade. He doesn’t have any social media accounts like facebook or twitter. He thinks they are a waste of time. He does use youtube in place of TV. I don’t limit his time on the computer or xbox because there has been no reason to. My son is a 2nd degree black belt in karate, cross country runner, Sea Cadet as well as a high honors student. If your child is in a high school sports program, they will have practice 6+ days a week (my son is running twice a day right now.) They will have no extra time for silly internet activities. My son willingly goes to sleep at 9:30-10PM every night. If you ran 8+ miles a day & then went to karate, you would be tired by 9:30 too.
@Qute –
You are absolutely correct that having access to a child’s social media accounts will not necessarily prevent them from being stupid online. However, we generally tend to behave better when we know that a legitimate authority is potentially monitoring our behavior, and when we know that our misbehavior will lead to clear and powerful consequences. My hope is that if a child knows that there are no secrets online, they will think twice before sharing anything that they wouldn’t also be willing to share with their parents.
@TeacherJR
“However, we generally tend to behave better when we know that a legitimate authority is potentially monitoring our behavior”
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
I do agree it is about a happy medium and teaching kids responsibility. After all if you are controlling everything a college bound senior does on social media, they are going to go wild when they get to college. If things get worse we will end up with a society like Ekalfwons (from Bubble Burst: The Truth About the Dairy Farm) where kids exist in bubbles that spy on them until they are 28. But I also think if your kids give you reason to suspect a problem with their social media use then you might have to intervene.
Both adults and children can do stupid stuff on social media and the *intranets*.
From this weekend- Look at our Presidential nominee(so many posts to choose from), the NBA player who accidentally sent out a dick pic on twitter, and the Miss Teen USA pageant *winner* who has a social media history using the N word quite a bit.
I don’t stalk my teens and their phone usage. Honestly, I wish they didn’t have access to so much data on smartphones and instead had dumbphones. Or walkie talkies. But I also can’t deny that technology is part of our lives and needs to be used responsibly, with rules and best practices. So far, they haven’t given me any reason not to trust them. If they do, they loose the phone. It is a privilege, not a right, to have cellphones! They don’t post much and are more observers of nonsense. But they do enjoy a good snapchat faceswap…
Talk to your kids and their friends. Find out what they are doing by being respectful of their privacy and ask the same of them. It’s not like reading a journal- there are serious consequences to mistakes with technology. But I also believe that it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy to set your kids up to not trust them (by stalking them on social media) with what they do online. Teens are very resourceful at finding ways to take risks. I’d rather take the high road and teach them how to be responsible online and have consequences if necessary vs. trying to control them and treating them like potential f*ck-ups all the time.
>>The problem with monitoring is if kids really want to keep things incognito, they’ll simply sign up for a secret account, unknown to the parents.<<
The other problem with monitoring is that parents can't monitor kids' every move forever (in either the digital world OR in the physical world), and some young people will go crazy as soon as the monitoring stops. I've seen it happen many times over in university, from relatively minor mistakes (like not knowing how to do laundry, or why it's dangerous to eat chicken that's still pink in the middle), to really major mistakes, like binge-drinking, selling drugs, and having promiscuous sex. I made mistakes too, of course, but the kind of mistakes I made were usually things that could be fixed by, say, apologizing to the person I hurt, replacing the keys I lost, re-sitting the exam I missed, or, on one memorable occasion, calling an R.A. when my room got flooded. My parents were more "helicopter" than most from birth through grade eight (lol), but once I got to high school, and found my footing there by getting involved in music, student government, theatre, and other short-term projects through the years, they backed off a LOT, and let me become my own person. So, by the time I got to university, I wasn't easily swayed by peer pressure, because I wasn't rebelling against parental pressure.
“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”
Panopticon.
“Regarding the technical side of the proposal that they’ll simply use an incognito or secret account, they could do so at school, at the library, at the coffee house, or at a friends house. But not at home. The router can be setup to block and record sites visited — this is done outside of the realm of the smart phone, tablet, or computer.”
Your average Internet-savvy teenager will need almost 2 minutes to overcome this kind of snooping. You average Internet-savvy teenager also doesn’t know how to cover their tracks, but control of the router does not work to effectively limit access to the Internet unless you aggressively limit access to only whitelisted sites, and curate your whitelist carefully.
@Katie –
Ekalfwons? As in “snowflake” spelled backwards? Because they’re all such precious, fragile little snowflakes. I get it.
When they are using the family computer it is pretty worry free – it’s all about when they get their own smart phones! I guess it’s a matter of whether or not you raised them wisely until then. Which is of course easier said than done.
As a younger mom I will say, when my family found and began following my social media is exactly when I made new accounts that weren’t findable by them. BTW I wasn’t doing anything wrong or even sketchy, it has to do with the specific way I use social media and the fact that I’m a private person (yes this can happen! I am an artist but I want privacy from family/friends regarding that work). Giving your kids some privacy online and on their phones is a real gift, I think there are times to step in but if you encouraged them to have goals and hobbies, and they don’t have sketchy friends, then you can relax a little. There is a lot you have to teach them but most of the good stuff you are teaching them will cross over.
I couldn’t bear it if someone were checking my internet history and my social media accounts so I would not do that to my child, even if it meant postponing giving them their own smartphone.
Perhaps I’m old-fashioned, but I don’t think kids should be on social media if they aren’t trustworthy and need to be cyber-stalked. Some kids aren’t mature enough with technology.
“You should be ready to own what you say in real life and what you post online.”
Our rule is if you wouldn’t say it to someone’s face, don’t say it online. The internet can make people feel bolder and braver to say things to hurt or insult others who don’t agree with them. Don’t engage these people, it’s a good rule in life to avoid dramatic people who like to argue.
Spying on your kids doesn’t make for trusting, open communication. There’s something fundamentally missing if you need to review every text, tweet, and email of any family member.
And sometimes we give the kids just enough rope to hang themselves — or, in the case of my 16 year-old son, materials to build the gallows. For some dumba$$ reason he thought it was okay to (a) sneak out of the house at 2 a.m. and (b) scale the fence of our neighborhood pool (where we are members) and (c) post a selfie of him there on Snapchat. A “friend” screenshotted that and ratted him out to the pool board. Now he is banned from the pool for the rest of the summer and oh, so mortified by it all. He learned a lesson the hard way, and his dad and I did not have to hear all about how “unfair” our punishment is — because the pool board handed it down. FIle that under “lesson learned.” If I were not so embarrassed (and seriously questioning his judgement at this point), I would find it funny.
Well, I’m not on board with this one. In fact, one big reason I want my son to “range free” is so that he’s not so inclined to get sucked into an electronic black hole that he mistakes for real life, as an ersatz version of freedom.
My son is still little, so it’s theoretical at this point, but I think insisting that e-mail and social media be done on a family computer that is public and readable by the parent is perfectly reasonable and desirable. I have noticed, by the way, that when I read profiles of prominent IT inventors and trailblazers, they nearly always mention that this is the rule in their family.
It seems to me that social media in general are problematic in that they blur what’s public and what’s private, and a person who is not mature cannot possibly negotiate that well. In fact, it’s likely to permanently warp their sense of private vs. public spheres.
In short, when my son wants to say something his mom can’t overhear, he can darn well put in the effort to ride his bike to a place where he can do that naturally!
“Honestly, I wish they didn’t have access to so much data on smartphones and instead had dumbphones. Or walkie talkies.”
This is the part I don’t understand. If you don’t want them to have a smartphone, why give them one? I hear all my friends with older kids bewailing this stuff – how can they find a good enough filter for all those tablets, smartphones, etc.
And listening in I just think, “Uh, okay. So why are you footing the bill for this?”
@Anna-
Not for lack of trying….we gave our teens their first cell phones when they started middle school. They were whatever cheap phones came with the family plan and not expensive. Within the year, they asked for iphones. We said no because they were too expensive. Both kids saved enough money to buy them on their own (with expensive cases to protect them). So far, they are very responsible and use the technology responsibly. My older son rarely uses social media (says it’s all duck face girls taking too many selfies) but uses the photography functions of his phone quite often. I love getting pictures from my kids.
My youngest has no cellphone (even though she bikes to school and could use it for emergencies). She is the kid with no filter and speaks her mind. She has no social media accounts(disaster waiting to happen) even though all of her friends do. They had a guidance counselor speak to her grade (when they were 9 years old!) about social media as these young kids all had accounts! Even the teacher was baffled as to why so many kids were had access to social media and devises.
Like you, we did the family computer for all of our kids until we trusted them. Youngest is still not to be trusted, unfortunately. My older daughter has friends with parents who monitor all of their accounts. It makes her uncomfortable to communicate with this friend when she knows the mom is screening things. They don’t think it’s fair and believe this friend is being treated unfairly despite being a good kid. She has a boyfriend she is hiding from her mom. Another of my daughter’s friends confided in me that a boy in her neighborhood asked for naked pictures (which she refused to send). Most people (parents and teachers) think he is a wonderful kid but all of the girls agreed he is a creeper. Talking to your kids, not stalking them, is still the way to go. They will be more forthcoming with information when your not trying to trap them like criminals. They’re just kids and will make mistakes. Adults do on social media all of the time.
@lollpoplover:
I see what you’re saying, if your kids have the money to pay for it themselves – although I still think a lot of my friends who complain are bringing it on themselves by paying for the technology.
And I guess the right age is all relative: I’m quite put off by the parents of my babysitter, who won’t allow her an e-mail account of her own at the age of 18 (I have to e-mail her through her dad to arrange a job). But on the other hand, I’d feel perfectly justified retaining reading access to a 15 or 16-year-old’s e-mail account.
@BL: Well… at least this post is one big peer review…? 🙂
Kids aren’t taught critical thinking skills at home or in school, precisely to make them vulnerable to manipulation by those conventional authorities. But that strategy also leaves kids in need of “protection” – how convenient for parental tyrants! Despotism is a great system, much more efficient and streamlined than true democracy, but only if the despots are gifted leaders or consistently lucky. Met any despots like that lately? Ever?
I think this is a good approach and is reasonable. For the most part, this is what we have done and it has worked well. The few times where we felt we had to look, showed up some problems that were about to become very serious and we were able to do something productive.
I worked in a university counseling center, so I saw what happened at both ends of the parental monitoring/controlling spectrum. Many of them didn’t fare so well.
@Anna being the kid without phone when others have one can be quite isolating – you are left out of activities organized impulsively which is most of them when all others have phone. The same goes for not being able to play the same game (pokemon) as everyone else or being on the same network.
I used to be that kid and I had good friends who made fair effort to reach me usually.
So, depending on my kids personality – how much the kid is fine with being isolated or loner – I might foot the bill for device I would not considered otherwise.
Also, I am a programmer and see how access to technology when growing up made difference in a lot of ways – be it confidence or basic skills you build on later. There is no way I would become programmer had my parents restricted my access to computer and show me around when I was young so I was confident and knew basics. However, I had seen how much behind I was in thing my parents did not bought (e.g. anything that required better computer or internet at the time) and simply could not compete with guys who grew up using them. I seen multiple career tracks inaccessible to me at the time, since class could not make up for different pre existent knowledge.
It is not necessary that I would spend the time doing productive things, it was a lot about confidence and ability to correctly guess how much behind I was or how complicated it us.
I think this might be why so many programmers or techies of my generation played the games – games were the thing that made you comfortable with it, made you assume tech is learnable to you and oftentimes forced you to learn basics so that the device was not completely new or impenetrable when you was making the career decision.
“I think this might be why so many programmers or techies of my generation played the games — games were the thing that made you comfortable with it, made you assume tech is learnable to you and oftentimes forced you to learn basics so that the device was not completely new or impenetrable when you was making the career decision.”
I think this used to be true, for instance in my generation (which may also be yours? I’m 40.) The kids who played games back then often learned to program and eventually did so professionally. But my observations – mainly from teaching undergrads a few years back – are that the current crop of young adults are actually, contrary to popular opinion, not tech-savvy at all.
Unlike my classes in high school and college, which always contained a handful of guys who were highly skilled programmers, the classes I taught 5-10 years ago had none. The kids spent all their time on social media, phones, games, etc., but they only knew how to use the front end of all the devices and programs they used. Basically, the much-vaunted tech skills they were so comfortable with: they were really good at clicking and pointing and emoticons, but that was about it.
So no, I don’t think lacking a smartphone will compromise my son’s future. About being the only one without, that is true (I was always that kid myself), but I think I’d rather he find a friend or two to actually interact with, rather than dozens of them, all locked in their VR prisons, pretending to interact.
@Anna-
It’s not just that they had the money (though I’m proud they both have jobs), but middle school academics (and sports and activities) strongly influenced the decision. They routinely use their phones (research, communications) in class and facetime makes group projects after school easy. Our school district has student email accounts and provides free software for families. They get practice/game updates sent to their student emails and are expected to follow code of conduct standards with communication. I’m glad they are learning responsible use of technology in and out of the classroom. I’m baffled that your babysitter at 18 has to go through her father for email. My kids got school emails in 4th grade.
I know several women who were stalked/gps-tracked by their ex-husbands. It’s a controlling behavior and extremely damaging to the victims. I see parents trying to control, filter, and intervene in the lives of their children under the guise of *keeping them safe*online and I have to question the motives of the parents and need for control. I’m not saying to turn a blind eye to what your kid is doing online, but also don’t think stalking them will build a positive relationship. Like most of parenting, its finding a balance.
It’s not like reading a journal- there are serious consequences to mistakes with technology. But I also believe that it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy to set your kids up to not trust them (by stalking them on social media) with what they do online. Teens are very resourceful at finding ways to take risks. I’d rather take the high road and teach them how to be responsible online and have consequences if necessary vs. trying to control them and treating them like potential f*ck-ups all the time.
Yes, lollpoplover, I agree.
First, those serious consequences: Anyone who knows someone on the sex offender registry because they sent or received naked pictures can attest to those extremely serious consequences.
My personal experience with my kids is that trusting them has a HUGE positive payback for all of us. They know I will not monitor their use of their phones or computers and they treasure that trust. Have they screwed up? Probably, but I don’t know about it. That means that they have been handling any bad consequences without my help, and that is what we want them to do. They have come to me with other mistakes they’ve made (just none involving social media) so I know they would tell me if their online foolishness needed my intervention.
The consequences should not be as drastic as they are. Laws that make criminals of kids for being dumb kids should be changed. Do we really want to put our kids through the criminal justice system for sending naked pics? Really? If not, we ought to contact our legislators and let them know that the laws need to be changed.
Teens are very resourceful when it comes to finding ways to take risks. As parents, we ought to focus on helping them to deal with what can happen with they misjudge those risks.
Someone else mentioned this–
Adult couples who share email addresses make it difficult for those who want to communicate with one person in the couple. If I want to say something private in an email to the Mrs, I have to do it knowing that the Mr is going to read it too. I think couples set up their emails that way so that they have no secrets from each other. Hurray for them, I guess, but the ick-factor on my side is definitely not appreciated.
Kids need to be able to communicate with each other. Can they do that if they know the parents are going to see what was said? Kids deserve privacy.
” I’m baffled that your babysitter at 18 has to go through her father for email. My kids got school emails in 4th grade.”
Yes, me too! They belong to a really weird religious subculture. Even so, it’s quite bizarre and inconvenient, given that she has so many customers it almost amounts to a full-time job – she can’t communicate with her customers directly. God only knows what horrible things her parents fear she would get up to if she were allowed online!
@Marie- Totally agree that the consequences are too severe and nonsensical. It’s hard to have these conversations with your kids about things that could get them in really big trouble when headlines and TV feature nudies of a potential First Lady with just stars (how patriotic!) over her nipples are mainstream. It’s a warped and confusing world.
I had one of my daughter’s friends confide in me about a boy who asked for nude pics. He is 3 years older and likely would get in a lot of trouble doing this. I promised to keep her confidence, but also know his mom. If it were my kid, would I want to know? I would. So I will reach out to his mom next week, invite her for coffee or go for a run. I’ll tell her what I heard (and respect this teen’s anonymity) and let her address it with her horny teen. I believe it takes a village to keep our kids off the sex offender registry. Dumb kids with smartphones can be a dangerous combination, unfortunately.
Reading their e mails, texts and posts is no different than reading their mail, diary / journal and picking up the extention to listen to their conversation.
Spying is spying no matter how you say it.
“I had one of my daughter’s friends confide in me about a boy who asked for nude pics. He is 3 years older and likely would get in a lot of trouble doing this.”
I don’t think he can get in trouble for asking, if that’s as far as it goes. Nude photography is not a crime, but creation, distribution, and possession of child pornography are all crimes, and serious ones. What’s the difference between the two? Consult a licensed attorney in your jurisdiction, and be prepared to hear “well, it depends…” as the answer.
IF criminal charges are in order, however, the point at which they become appropriate is when child pornography is created, distributed, or possessed.
There are so many monitoring apps out there, and the aim of using them is to keep loved ones safe. I don’t think it is too controlling of me or any parent to use monitoring apps (e.g. xnspy) to track a child’s GPS location history to make sure that he/she is safe. I am no authority on the subject of parental care, but I feel that it is important to let them know that we are watching them only to keep them safe and to guide them to learn to respect the concept of privacy as they grow into adults.
Liza
You’re hilarious! !!!!!!
You talk about teaching them respect for privacy in the same breath that you are saying it’s okay to track their every move. Give your head a shake.