Some of the most important changes to our lives that come from the digital revolution can be hard to see. Digital makes parents work harder than ever to protect their children’s safety.
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By Jeffrey Cole
Our work in tracking digital change over the past 20 years has largely been based on identifying and explaining the big things that dramatically disrupt government, business and our daily lives: driverless cars, the impact of social networks, changes in media and entertainment, and much more.
Occasionally, it is useful to look back and notice the smaller changes that are altering the fabric of our lives. Some of the most pronounced changes are subtle and require a step back to understand how important they are. Not all change comes from multi-billion dollar deals or major product announcements.
These are changes that can only be discerned by watching and tracking digital use over a long period of time. In previous columns, I have looked at how acquiring digital books, photos, music and films can lead to the decluttering of our homes. In anther column, E-Nuff Already!, I looked at how we are overwhelmed by digital information and are trying to find the proper balance between using digital to our advantage and getting overloaded.
Using the Center’s unique data set of 20 years of tracking, and through conversations with parents and children, we have become fascinated by the less obvious ways parenting is changing.
No matter when or where we grew up in the last 100 years, our mothers and fathers (whether rich or poor, urban or rural) shared the same rules of growing up:
1. Look both ways before crossing the street. This is a simple survival instruction that we carry with us the rest of our lives and pass down to our children and grandchildren. It’s so simple we don’t even realize the permanent place in our brain where it has been printed.
2. Don’t ever take candy from or get into a car with a stranger. While most parents want their children to be trusting with other people and to respect age and authority, this was an important survival tip. As crime patterns went up or down, the importance of this warning never wavered. Sometimes our concerns have wavered from loose concerns to paranoiac.
Free-range parenting, where children should be trusted to walk to school as early as 8 to 10 years of age, has become controversial, with some adults reporting these children’s parents to the police.
At other times, fear about the risk of child abduction has reached such a fervor that it made some children afraid of stepping outside their front doors. The Denver Post won a Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for showing how child abduction rates were hugely overstated and exaggerated. When you remove parental custody disputes and runaways, the number of children abducted every year by strangers is in the mid-double digits. Many police departments say that there has never been an era in America where children overall are more safe than now. However, even today kids need to know not to take candy from or get into a car with somebody they don’t know.
These two rules have stood the test of time. Today, they are as essential than ever for children to internalize and follow. Looking both ways before crossing is even more important as more people travel to other countries where cars are driven on a different side of the road. The American instinct to look left can get us badly injured unless followed by also looking right.
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Parenting is never an easy job. Technology can buy parents some free time as their children are occupied with digital devices and content. But, as these new safety rules make clear, digital technology adds significantly to the role of the parent. Parents have to learn the new technologies themselves, watch how their children use them, and then impose rules to encourage good behavior and discourage bad behavior.
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New digital parenting rules
Over the past 20 years, parents have had to add another three or four (or in some cases more) safety rules that address life in a digital age.
While children can clearly see the importance of the old rules, they may be more resistant or even challenge their new rules because it may diminish their online activities, relationships or profiles.
Here are the new life lessons that now have to be added to the traditional two, all of which deal with the internet and social media:
1. Don’t give out any personal details about you or your family online. This is an extension of the fear of the stranger. Today, children are taught never to give out their name, location, or personal details to an audience where they do not know who is listening or watching.
2. Do not put anything online you would not want the whole world to know. The old version of this was, “do not share anything you would not want to see on the front page of the newspaper.” This lesson teaches kids the fear of a permanent record where the silly things we may put online, we are warned, may come back to haunt us in college applications, job interviews, or personal relationships.
Evan Spiegel must have had this lesson front and center when he created Snapchat. Some may forget, the original purpose of Snapchat (now Snap) was that users (particularly teenagers) could share pictures with each other without a permanent record: the pictures disappeared after 10 to 15 seconds. Of course, people quickly learned how to screen-capture disappearing photos, but Snapchat was designed to reconcile our social media use with our parents’ warning.
3. Don’t ever agree to meet someone you met online in person. If you must, make sure it is in a very public place. This completely does away with any trust of unknown people (as it should). It teaches children that people online may not be who the say they are (or even close) and can represent a real and physical danger.
These are the three basic digital rules that join the traditional two.
Parents knew how to enforce the first two important rules through repetition and monitoring.
The digital rules are much more difficult to enforce, particularly in the first ten years of digital when parents may not have been online, had less understanding of the Internet than their children, and in some cases had to ask their children how to police these rules.
Beyond safety
The entire job of parenting requires a new digital chapter. And these are just the safety issues. These rules do not address equally important concerns of when should a child get access to the internet, their own email address, a smartphone, texting, and social media. How much digital access is appropriate for various stages of development? Should denial of digital access be used as a punishment for bad behavior?
It is not as simple as parents–looking at all the dangers and problems of digital use–simply forbidding their children from going online.
All parents today fear the moment the first kid in their child’s class gets a smartphone. That begins a multi-year unrelenting campaign where their child asks/begs/demands/threatens to get a phone just like all the other kids. The parents have to give in at a certain point or their child can be stigmatized as the only one without digital access, cut off from the primary channels of communication with their peer group.
Parenting is never an easy job. Technology can buy parents some free time as their children are occupied with digital devices and content. But, as these new safety rules make clear, digital technology adds significantly to the role of the parent. Parents have to learn the new technologies themselves, watch how their children use them, and then impose rules to encourage good behavior and discourage bad behavior.
Parenting is one thing that will never be replaced by a machine.
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Jeffrey Cole is the founder and director of The Center for the Digital Future at USC Annenberg.
See all columns from the center.
March 27, 2019