We cannot emphasize enough – parenting matters in today’s onlife world, especially when it comes to adolescents, pre-teens, and a younger teens’ use of technology! Providing these age groups with unmediated and unsupervised use of technology, which has been primarily designed for adults, can often lead to bad outcomes.
As technology continues to become more ubiquitous in our daily lives, it’s important for parents and caregivers to understand the potential risks and benefits that come with their child’s use of digital technology. In today’s onlife world, adolescents, pre-teens, and younger teens are more connected than ever before, which means that parents and caregivers need to be more educated and vigilant about their child’s online activities than ever before.
While technology can provide valuable educational opportunities, entertainment, and social connections, it can also expose young people to the challenges of sleep deprivation, cyberbullying, online predators, and inappropriate content such as hypersexualization or pornography. Therefore, parents and caregivers must be proactive in helping their children navigate the digital world safely and responsibly together. Parents and caregivers need to be their child’s digital sheepdog and onlife mentor by adopting a collaborative approach to teaching digital literacy and internet safety. However, in order to achieve the goal of ensuring their child’s digital well-being, parents and caregivers must first proactively educate themselves about digital literacy and internet safety.
Regrettably, our anecdotal experience has shown that many parents lack the knowledge and skills necessary to safely and responsibly guide their children through today’s digital landscape. As a result, it is crucial for parents and caregivers to actively engage in their own self-initiated digital education, keeping themselves informed about the latest developments and best practices related to digital literacy and internet safety in today’s onlife world. This will empower parents and caregivers to assist their child’s digital learning and development, enabling them to navigate the onlife world with confidence and resilience. Parenting in today’s onlife world differs significantly from how our parents raised us in the past, and it is therefore incumbent upon today’s parents and caregivers to acknowledge this reality. Neglecting this issue as a parent or caregiver is no longer acceptable.
We acknowledge that this takes effort on the part of parents or caregivers, and can be challenging in today’s busy onlife world. However, we are the ones providing our kids with the digital keys to the digital highway. Sure, tech companies and social media platforms have a part to play, but parents and caregivers have the most important part- that’s what makes us parents and caregivers. We need to be our child’s best parents and not their best friend when it comes to technology, but to do this we need to educate ourselves first.
To provide digital well-being and foster digital resiliency, parents and caregivers must adopt a digital transformational learning approach to digital literacy. This approach entails a critical evaluation of a parent or caregiver’s assumptions about technology based upon good evidence-based research, its role in their child’s daily lives, and the potential impact that technology can have on their child’s personal relationships and mental health – this comes from education. By embracing a digital transformational learning approach, parents and caregivers can develop a deeper understanding of the digital world and equip their child with the necessary knowledge, skills, and digital resiliency needed to navigate today’s onlife world more safely, securely, and responsibly.
Unfortunately, we find that “some” parents and caregivers take a more reactive approach to digital literacy rather than a proactive digital transformational approach as was just discussed.
Taking a reactive approach to a child’s use of technology is less than desirable because it often involves waiting until an issue arises before a parent or caregiver takes action. This can be detrimental to a youth’s digital well-being, as it may result in them developing negative habits or engaging in risky behaviors before parents can intervene. It can also leave parents feeling overwhelmed and unsure about how to parent their child’s online activity effectively.
A proactive digital transformational approach to digital literacy education can help parents and caregivers develop the necessary skills and knowledge base to keep up with the ever-changing digital landscape, enabling them to take a more proactive role in their child’s digital lives. By doing so, parents and caregivers can ensure better digital well-being and more positive onlife outcomes for their child.
Applying a digital transformational learning approach upon the introduction of technology can help parents, caregivers, and youth develop a deeper understanding of the digital world and its potential risks, enabling all to navigate the digital landscape in a safer and more responsible way together. However, to achieve this parents and caregivers need to educate themselves about digital literacy and internet safety first, and this education needs to be ongoing given the fluidity of today’s onlife world.
Parenting matters in today’s onlife world, and digital literacy and internet safety are essential skills for parents and caregivers to develop on an ongoing basis. By educating themselves about the latest digital trends and risks, setting clear rules and boundaries, communicating openly with a child, teaching them about privacy and security, and using parental control tools where appropriate and reasonable to do so, parents and caregivers can help their child navigate the digital world more safely, securely, and responsibly.
As we have stated in other blog articles (1)(2)(3) – the five essential parenting elements to keeping our kids safer online:
- Allowing and enabling youth age-appropriate agency to help build resiliency
- Modeling of technology by parents and caregivers
- Facilitating ongoing parental communication with their child about their use of technology
- Ongoing parental participation in their child’s onlife world, and
- Practicing appropriate and reasonable parental oversight
However, to implement these five-essential parenting elements, we parents, caregivers and even educators need to educate ourselves first.
Our approach to the ever-changing onlife world is focused on embracing technology and developing a deeper understanding of it, rather than rejecting it outright- it’s not about “no” technology, it’s all about “know” technology. To this end, we provide free educational resources for parents and caregivers to help them adopt a transformational “know” approach to digital literacy and internet safety skills. By utilizing these resources, parents and caregivers can mitigate youth technology and social media dilemmas, ultimately helping to keep our kids safer in today’s onlife world. You can find these free resources on our website and our blog located at www.thewhitehatter.ca
Remember, when we share our concerns with our kids about their onlife world, we should do so in a way that ties into where they are today, is relevant to their life, and appeals to their intelligence and experience. This will help them make good onlife decisions. However, to do this we need to educate ourselves first!
Digital Food For Thought
The White Hatter
- https://thewhitehatter.ca/blog/parents-and-caregivers-how-to-help-mediate-youth-technology-social-media-dilemmas/
- https://thewhitehatter.ca/blog/its-not-about-no-tech-its-all-about-know-tech-when-it-comes-to-our-kids/
- https://thewhitehatter.ca/blog/parenting-youth-technology-finding-the-balance-between-trust-consequences/
