Parenting in the Digital Age: Finding a Healthy Balance Webinar Part II

Parenting in the Digital Age: Finding a Healthy Balance, Part 2

Last week we held the second part of our "Parenting in the Digital Age: Finding a Healthy Balance" parent webinar series. Once again I was joined by Mathew Meyers, a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist from Traverse Counseling. He specializes in family relationships and healthy technology use including video game addiction. Mathew and I have known each other for a few years as he has served on our District Digital Health & Wellness Committee. He has great insight into parenting, kids, and relationships. He and his wife have three children. I always enjoy discussing technology topics and parenting with Mathew.

So many parents are seeking help, answers and advice as to how to parent and manage our kids’ technology use. Keeping up can be challenging, but a positive and well informed approach can have a big impact on a child’s future and habits. We’ve had a great response to this series, and parents have been anxious to get tips and ideas. We had over 300 parents sign up for the first webinar, and almost 250 for the second. Plus, since it is recorded we put the links on our school website for anyone to view at their convenience afterwards.  

We followed up the first parent webinar with a survey in which we asked parents what they wanted to learn more about. So based on their feedback, we addressed the topics that were requested during part two of our webinar. These included discussion of more parenting strategies and tips, digital footprints, cyberbullying, and pornography and sexting. You can view the full webinar here. Part 1 of this conversation about screen time and balance, addiction, attention and focus, monitoring and filtering, modeling and age recommendations can be viewed here.

As educators, it’s so important for us to encourage parents to maintain continual open dialog about technology and understand the significant role they play in helping youth be responsible and safe in today’s high-tech world. As Mathew stated near the beginning of this second webinar, all of us are historically blind--there is not template for parenting kids in the digital age. Helping the parents of the students in our schools focus and reflect on these important topics will help everyone in the long run, from the students in our individual classrooms to the community and society as a whole.

Related Posts:

• Parenting in the Digital Age: Finding a Healthy Balance Part I

• If My Parents Only Knew: My NBC KARE 11 Interview About Kids, Tech & Parenting

• Be Where Your Feet Are: #RealTime with Those Around You

• Best Age for a Kid to Get a Cellphone with Internet Access 

• Five Ways to Raise Digitally Balanced JOMO (Joy of Missing Out) Kids in a FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) World

• Techcognition in an Attention Economy

• Over 1/2 of Parents Keep Digital Devices Out of Kids' Bedrooms Overnight

• Happy Sweet 16! Now You Can Snapchat. (34% of Parents Don't Allow It Until High School.)

• Curbi: Great Option for Filtering and Monitoring an iPhone/iPad/iPod

• Quick & Easy Cell Phone Web Filtering for Kids (*and limitations)

• Can We Autocorrect Humanity? Get Busy Living

• Parenting with Purpose in the Digital Age... It's Complicated

• Parenting in the Digital Age Part 2: How Much Should Parents Snoop?

• Technology & Relationships- 15 minute interview

• Crazy Busy: You Are Letting the Screen Strangle Your Soul

• New Year's Resolution: 3 Ways to Cut Back on Digital Distractions

• My First Apple Watch: Solution to Distraction?

• District Digital Citizenship Committee: Tonka Schools Campaign to Raise Awareness of Cyber Safety at Home

• What's in a Name? Digital Health & Wellness vs. Digital Citizenship 

• The Teenage Brain +Dementia of the Preoccupied

• Top 10 Tips for Tech Healthy Kids: Raising Digitally Balanced Kids

Related topics:Minnetonka Schools Digital Citizenship Webpage 

Minnesota Trends in Social Media, Cyberbullying, and Digital Citizenship

For the past eight years I have had the privilege to speak about digital citizenship and cyber safety to tens of thousands of secondary students and parents in over 70 public and private school districts across Minnesota. I have shared the important message of using technology in healthy and appropriate ways by addressing current issues such as the latest apps, cyber bullying, inappropriate material, and digital footprints.  I am able to take vacation time off from my job in Minnetonka to do this. More info about my presentations is online. 

One of the things I do during my student presentations is to use PollEverywhere to engage the student audience by answering questions through text messaging. Their answers to multiple choice or yes/no questions are displayed instantly on the screen for all to see, and then we discuss the results. Most often, about a half to three fourths of the students in the audience choose to participate (not everyone has a cellphone/texting, I suppose some feel it's not anonymous, while others may be "too cool" to do this).  Recently I decided to export the polls into a report to see the cumulative results from the students' answers so far this year. Some of the questions I've recently changed, so not all of these polls have the same number of students responding.  The graphs below show the answers of 1,247-4,956 students grades 6-12 polled statewide.

One interesting trend over the years has been to see the rise and fall of Facebook in popularity. When I started giving these presentations years ago, I was talking about a site called MySpace with students (remember that?).  I saw the rise of Facebook a few years later.  Recently, now that Mom, Grandma, and teachers have signed up for Facebook, the students are quickly leaving for other tools like Instagram and Vine.  

Other trends I notice are that older high school students are not the quickest adopters; I see more grade 8-10 students begin using the latest tools and applications faster than their older classmates.  I also have noticed a delay in the adoption of the newer trending tools that seems to increase the farther away from the Twin Cities metro area the school is located.  Below are answers to the question, "Which three of these tools do you use the most?"

Another trend I'm seeing is an increase in the occurrence of cyber bullying statewide each year.  On the past round of the Minnesota State Student Survey last taken by students in 2013, 79-92% of students reported having never been cyber bullied in the past 30 days:

When I started asking that exact same question this year, only 59% of students now report never having been cyber bullied: 

I think with the growing number of students with cellphones and smartphones at even younger ages than ever before, cyber bullying is on the rise and should be a topic that is continually addressed by both schools and families, even though it seems like the media coverage has moved past this topic. We need to help students realize how quickly things can be posted, forwarded, and kept through technology, and how difficult it is to remove/take something back:  

We need to help them to think first before they post, and only post and digitize things they would be comfortable with everyone seeing, including Grandma:

We can help them understand these thing through continual dialog and reminders. We need to help them be safe as they use technology and do the right thing.  We can help them to create a positive online presence and digital footprint so they have the best future possible!  

Here's a link to the handout of the top tips I give parents and staff at my presentations which you are welcome to use and share. 

Parenting with Purpose in the Digital Age... Managing New Devices Received at the Holidays

Teaching kids to use technology responsibly is the responsibility of both families and schools.  In an effort to help parents, we've been offering parent education talks on the topic for about the past seven years, such as one this Thursday, Parenting Tech Savvy Elementary Kids 101, January 8, 2015, 6:30–8pm, in the Excelsior Elementary Auditorium. My colleague, Kelli Whiteside, an Elementary Media Specialist, and I will be presenting.  We offer free transportation for parents in the school district that may not have a vehicle. Our elementary session description is:

Tablets, Smartphones, Minecraft, Instagram, Snapchat . . . Technology is a big part of our kids’ world! Keeping up can be challenging, but a positive and well informed approach can have a big impact on your child’s future and habits. Learn how to help your kids develop a balanced and healthy use of technology.  Get tips to develop safe and effective research habits, ideas for maintaining open dialog about technology, and understand the significant role you play in helping your child be responsible and safe in today’s high-tech world. Numerous ideas and free resources like Common Sense Media will be shared. This presentation is geared toward parents of children in E – 5th grades.

A link to our handout with all of these tips and resources can be found at tinyurl.com/CyberResources. Some of our tips include:

1. Celebrate and Encourage Positive Uses of Technology
2. Proactively share values, consequences, expectations away from home
3. Model a Healthy Balance and Limit Entertainment Screen Time vs. Educational Screen Time 
4. Actively engage and monitor, keep informed of trends, pop culture
5. Set up a filter and restrictions for all screens
6. Talk about respectful etiquette and cyberbullying
7. Avoid Violent Video Games

At school with students, we begin this process early in elementary school, with media specialists using the Common Sense Media curriculum with our students whom they see for direct instruction each week.  At our secondary level, we are embedding the Common Sense Media curriculum into our announcements and also some of our advisory/homerooms.  If you haven't ever looked at Common Sense Media, it's great.  I'm always recommending this site to parents as a great place for up to date news on the latest trends, reviews of movies, apps, video games, etc., and advice on parenting in the Digital Age.  We keep updating information to share with our students' families about cyber safety and digital citizenship on our website, including tips such as instructions about installing home internet filters and links to other resources. We started a District Task Force on Digital Citizenship this past summer. We've also refreshed a poster campaign, with some elementary and secondary examples pictured below:

 

Our hope is that by repeatedly reminding and educating both students and parents through multiple mediums and means, our students will be safe and responsible digital citizens. 

Watch a 90 minute Minnetonka Parent Digital Citizenship Presentation for Secondary Students or 60 minute webinar.

See also:

Parenting with Purpose in the Digital Age... It's Complicated

Parenting in the Digital Age Part 2: How Much Should Parents Snoop?

Parenting in the Digital Age Part 2: How Much Should Parents Snoop?

For about the past seven years I've been giving parent talks on cyber safety and digital citizenship. During that time, the technology has greatly changed. When I first started speaking to parents about how their children are using technology, it was about a site called MySpace and a phenomenon called texting. So much as happened since then, hasn't it?! Now days, some kids are getting smart phones in elementary school and beginning taking their first steps into the wide world of social media before they are teens. Conversations I once used to have with parents about their high school children shifted into middle school years ago and now I'm having these conversations with parents of elementary students. Although the technology has changed and the age of entry in which kids use it has gotten younger, many of the questions parents have had over the years have stayed the same: 

How do I keep up?  

How can I keep track of what they're doing?

How much monitoring is enough?  When is it too much?  

Isn't there a program that can do this for me?  

Unless you pretty much block your child from all technology and Internet access, there's really not a one stop tool that takes care of parenting children today's digital age. I certainly don't believe that is they way to go.  Technology is an integral part of our everyday lives.  As parents, we have the opportunity to help kids learn to use it appropriately and safely while our children are with us at home in order to prepare them for a successful future as an adult.  (The tips that I recommended to parents are here.  I also blogged about it previously.)

Start gradually and slowly expand the freedom
after practice and success.

A colleague of mine uses this picture and the analogy of learning to ride a bike when talking to parents about how much monitoring to do with technology and their child. When learning to ride a bike, you begin with training wheels, then you're able to ride on two wheels with Mom or Dad holding onto the bike, then you graduate to no assistance.   As you get better at things, you're allowed to move beyond the vicinity of your house and ride down the street, around the block, and eventually another part of town.  You still check in with your parents and let them know that you're leaving, where you're going and when you'll be back. So, too, it is with letting your kids use technology.  Start with the training wheels, then hold onto them as they learn on two wheels, as those are removed monitor them close by, and then eventually give them periods of time where they go off independently. Start gradually and slowly expand the freedom after practice and success.

But how much is too much?  

When should the monitoring end?  

How does a parent know when to step back and when to step in?

Recently a conversation with another colleague about this very topic was insightful. We were recalling how our parents never really had access to our conversations and communication with our friends unless they were in the same room with us, intercepted a note, or perhaps read a diary. I was reflecting how I would have never wanted my parents to listen to my phone calls with my friends or conversations I had in the hall or on the bus, but if I were to look at my child's phone it felt like that's just what I would be doing.  So how do you balance freedom with the worry of whether or not technology is being used appropriately? Today's parent certainly has a wide array of tools available at their disposal to be much more big-brother-like in their monitoring of their children's communication and social life.  My colleague said, 

"Let their behavior warrant the intervention."

I thought this was a great piece of advice.  Basically, she and her husband look for any changes in their child's behavior to determine whether or not any intervention is necessary, including technology use and monitoring. They watch for things such as changes in their child's grades, personality, friends, demeanor, and interactions they have with her.  When they see something change, then they decide whether or not they need to look at the child's phone and monitor social media more closely. They continue to have frequent conversations about their expectations for how their child uses technology, what's appropriate and inappropriate, and what the consequences are for not adhering to these expectations.  

What do you think?  What has worked well for you?  What advice would you share?

Parenting with Purpose in the Digital Age... It's Complicated

Twitter, Instagram, Vine, Tumblr, Snap Chat and more. Keeping up with our children’s technology use is tough and ever changing, but critical to their safety and future. Unfortunately, it seems like there are always headlines about kids getting into trouble and even danger due to technology use.  An incident in the Minneapolis area in the past week involved two 13 year old girls being kidnapped by a man they were in contact with through their cellphones using the Omegle app, which lets any user connect to random strangers instantly. The disclaimer in the fine print at the bottom of their homepage pictured below reads in part:
 

 

"Do not use Omegle if you are under 13. If you are under 18, use it only with a parent/guardian's permission. 

Do not transmit nudity, sexually harass anyone, publicize other peoples' private information, make statements that defame or libel anyone, violate intellectual property rights, use automated programs to start chats, or behave in any other inappropriate or illegal way on Omegle. 

Understand that human behavior is fundamentally uncontrollable, that the people you encounter on Omegle may not behave appropriately, and that they are solely responsible for their own behavior. 

Use Omegle at your own peril. 

Disconnect if anyone makes you feel uncomfortable."

Just reading their disclaimer would make most any parent cringe.  There are so many similar sites, they can't possibly all be monitored, blocked, or even kept track of...  so what's a parent to do?

Teaching kids to use technology responsibly is the responsibility of both families and schools.  In an effort to help parents, we've been offering parent education talks on the topic for about the past seven years, such as one tonight, Parenting Tech Savvy Kids 101, Monday, October 6, 2014, 6:30–8pm, in our high school auditorium. We offer free transportation for parents in the school district that may not have a vehicle.  In January, we are offering this session again with an elementary focus.  (A recording of a lunchtime webinar from last year can be found here.)

At these sessions, we provide parents with tips for maintaining open dialog about technology and help them understand the significant role they play in helping their children be responsible and safe in today's high-tech world. We explain why kids should be cautious about what information they share online and be made aware of the permanency of their digital record.  We share numerous ideas and free resources like Common Sense Media as well as tips for setting up a filter on a home wireless network.  A link to my handout with all of these tips and resources can be found at tinyurl.com/CyberResources. My top tips are:

Top Tips for Parents and Teachers:

1. Celebrate and Encourage Positive Uses of Technology
2. Proactively share values, consequences, expectations away from home
3. Model a Healthy Balance and Limit Entertainment Screen Time vs. Educational Screen Time 
4. Actively engage and monitor, keep informed of trends, pop culture
5. Set up a filter and restrictions for all screens
6. Talk about pornography & sexting
7. Emphasize that nothing is private
8. Explain that everything is permanent
9. Talk about respectful etiquette and cyberbullying
10. Avoid Violent Video Games
11. Teach the Dangers of Distracted Driving

At school with students, we begin this process early in elementary school, with media specialists using the Common Sense Media curriculum with our students whom they see for direct instruction each week.  At our secondary level, we are embedding the Common Sense Media curriculum into our announcements and also some of our advisory/homerooms.  If you haven't ever looked at Common Sense Media, it's great.  I'm always recommending this site to parents as a great place for up to date news on the latest trends, reviews of movies, apps, video games, etc., and advice on parenting in the Digital Age.  We keep updating information to share with our students' families about cyber safety and digital citizenship on our website, including tips such as instructions about installing home internet filters and links to other resources. We started a District Task Force on Digital Citizenship this past summer. We've also refreshed a poster campaign, with some examples pictured below:

 

Our hope is that by repeatedly reminding and educating both students and parents through multiple mediums and means, our students will be safe and responsible digital citizens. 

(Here's an interesting followup to the news story mentioned above: When 13-year-olds went missing, Minnesota detectives cracked case with digital forensics plus some tips for parents.)