Raising Humans in a Digital World Read online

  Teens took to texting like ducks to water. In one month, today’s average teen processes 3,700 text messages, and that doesn’t even include all the private chatting that happens between kids in apps like Snapchat.17 I asked McArtney if he had any inkling texting would become so popular with youth. “No,” he answered. “And what really shocks me is how much time everyone spends with their heads down, looking awkwardly into little screens and not interacting with others, young and old alike. It’s not at all what we expected.”

  But if you stop to consider everything our phones can do today—access the internet, take pictures, deliver music and engaging games, tell time, give directions, order pizza—and most importantly, offer unparalleled social connectivity—it shouldn’t be shocking at all. In a short time, these gadgets truly have evolved into “smart” phones.

  “All these things came together in ways no one could have predicted,” says McArtney. “How can anyone, especially a kid, resist what a smartphone has to offer?”

  The answer is, they can’t.

  THE SMARTPHONE HAS CHANGED CHILDHOOD

  Psychologist and author Dr. Jean Twenge, an academic who studies generational trends, has written numerous scientific articles and three books based on her extensive research. Her most recent book, iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood, takes a hard look at the generation she dubs “iGen,” kids born between 1995 and 2012, the first kids to enter adolescence with smartphones in their hands.18 She asserts that these “iGen’ers,” a group that includes not only my own two children but also those I teach, are on the brink of the worst mental health crisis in decades. And the cause? You guessed it: their smartphones.

  In late 2017, Twenge wrote an article for The Atlantic with the provocative title “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” in which she distills the findings she presents in her book, writing, “the arrival of the smartphone has radically changed every aspect of teenagers’ lives, from the nature of their social interactions to their mental health.”19

  When her article hit, I was busy visiting schools and parent groups around the United States, giving talks about kids, technology, and the importance of digital literacy education. Nearly every place I visited, parents had either read or heard about Twenge’s findings and were eager to discuss them. While many heartily agreed that the smartphone is to blame for every adolescent problem (depression, anxiety, and sleep deprivation, just for starters), others found Twenge’s assertions (e.g., “the twin rise of the smartphone and social media has caused an earthquake of a magnitude we’ve not seen in a very long time, if ever”) overstated and alarmist.20 But no matter which side of the fence they landed on, parents were united in one concern: What do we do?

  You see, everyone knows the genie is out of the bottle and not going back in. Kids love their screens too much, and heck, so do we. Besides, it is clear they will need them for school and for work. So, while it’s important to be aware of how devices are reshaping childhood, we must also prepare youth for an adulthood that will inevitably include devices, or whatever technology comes next.

  IS YOUR CHILD READY?

  When to give your child today’s most coveted gift—her first smartphone (or a “connected” device of any kind)—is one of the biggest decisions a parent will have to make. Remember, a “connected device” is any gadget that connects to the internet. In addition to smartphones, this includes tablets, computers, gaming consoles, e-readers, smartwatches, and even Bluetooth-enabled toys and assistants. All of these have the capability of connecting your kids to all the world’s people and information, all the time. Any missteps they make on a connected device may be permanently recorded, for everyone to see. This is a weighty responsibility, and kids are woefully unprepared without guidance.

  When parents ask me, “What’s the right age to give my children (insert type of connected device here)?” I counter their question with one of my own. Well, seven questions, to be exact. I think every parent should first answer these questions before determining whether his child is ready for a connected device:

  •Have your children developed the social and emotional skills necessary to use their gadgets wisely? Have they learned how to show empathy, kindness, respect, and civility? These capacities evolve over time. They are in high demand online, and when expressed there, can turn it into the safer, kinder environment adults dream about.

  •Do your children know how to manage their online reputations? Increasingly, colleges and employers (and others) are looking to the internet to learn about our kids. So, do your children know that everything they post, and everything others post about them, contributes to an online reputation that speaks volumes about their character?

  •Do your children know how to unplug? By their own accounts, teens say they feel “addicted” to their devices.21 Have you equipped your children with strategies (and reasons) to unplug from their virtual worlds and plug into “real” life now and then?

  •Do your children know how to make and maintain safe and healthy relationships? Can they keep themselves safe from cyberbullying, predators, sexting, revenge porn, sextortion, and other online dangers? Do they know what to do if they encounter (and they probably will) dangerous or unhealthy relationships online?

  •Do your children know how to protect their privacy and personal information? In the excitement to sign up for new services and to share with friends, many kids unwittingly give away too much personal information, especially when those too young to know better use social media. (Three-quarters of children between ages ten and twelve have social media accounts, despite being below the minimum age requirement.22)

  •Do your children know how to think critically about the information they find online? Are they able to evaluate media messages for their accuracy, authority, currency, and bias? Not knowing how to do so leaves kids vulnerable to misinformation, “fake news,” and more.

  •Are your children equipped to be digital leaders? Do they know how to be upstanders? The internet is in desperate need of kids who can stand up to bullies, create inspiring content, make moving videos, share uplifting stories, and invent new technologies that improve our world. Are your kids equipped to make their digital world better and safer?

  If your answer to any of these questions is “no,” then your children are not ready for the massive responsibility of owning a connected device. The stakes are too high. However, you can teach them all of these life skills no matter how much, or how little, you personally know about technology. Be forewarned: These skills can’t be taught overnight. It will take time and patience to teach your kids how to manage, rather than avoid, the digital world’s complexities.

  It took me a while to figure this out for me and my own children. Frankly, a lot of trial and error was involved (sorry to my girls). Hopefully, by sharing what I’ve learned along my journey, which began almost two decades ago, yours will go more smoothly.

  MY OWN JOURNEY BEGINS

  On a cool autumn morning, in September 2000, I held the hand of my nearly five-year-old daughter as we approached the tiny portable structure that would be her kindergarten classroom. Like many mothers delivering children to school for the first time, I was nervous. But my nerves had less to do with day one of kindergarten, and more to do with the “school” we’d elected to send her to. Glancing around at the half dozen dilapidated portables crammed between a church and an adult educational facility, I started to get cold feet.

  Our daughter was one of just ninety students to enter the first parent-initiated public charter school in Orange County, California. Named “Journey School,” it was the first charter school in Capistrano Unified School District (CUSD), the eighth largest school district in the state and home to forty California Distinguished Schools and eleven National Blue Ribbon Schools. CUSD was, and remains, one of the top-performing districts in California and has a graduation rate of 97.1 percent, much higher than the state’s
average of 85.1 percent.23 Every CUSD high school is ranked in the top one thousand U.S. high schools by U.S. News & World Report.24 The schools are clean, safe, and well regarded. The logical decision would have been to send her to one of these perfectly fine schools—after all, charter schools were a relatively unknown and unproven concept at the time. Lawmakers had just passed the 1992 Charter Schools Act, and California was the second state in the country, after Minnesota, to enact charter school legislation. Only 1.7 percent of all U.S. public schools were charters.

  On top of being a charter school, Journey School veered off the traditional educational path in another way, too—it was a Waldorf school. The little my husband and I knew about Waldorf schools was gleaned entirely from an article we’d stumbled upon in The Atlantic, “Schooling the Imagination.” Its author, Todd Oppenheimer, offered a glowing account of schools that encouraged playfulness, imaginative wonderings, and a reverence for childhood. He wrote:

  This notion, that imagination is the heart of learning, animates the entire arc of Waldorf teaching. When that concept is coupled with the schools’ other fundamental goal, to give youngsters a sense of ethics, the result is a pedagogy that stands even further apart from today’s system of education, with its growing emphasis on national performance standards in subjects such as mathematics, science, and reading and its increasing rigor in standardized testing—to say nothing of the campaign to fill classrooms with computers.25

  Oppenheimer went on to describe how Waldorf schools fill their classrooms with handmade, natural objects and encourage children to interact with those, and each other, before screens. It sounded magical, and we were easily sold. What we didn’t know then was how popular Waldorf schools were, and continue to be, with parents who work in the tech industry, specifically because these schools believe “technology can wait.”26

  NO MEDIA AT THIS SCHOOL!

  Shortly after dropping off our daughter, we attended the school’s parent orientation, where several forms were passed out for parents to read, sign, and hand back to the school principal. One of these was the school’s media contract:

  MEDIA CONTRACT

  As you know, Journey School’s philosophy includes the exclusion of media during the week, from Sunday evening through Friday morning. This includes all electronic media: radio, CDs, cassettes, karaoke, electronic toys, videos, and TV. Our interest is in the children being connected to the warmth of a human voice rather than a voice that is electronically transmitted.

  My husband and I shot each other a sidewise glance before signing this one. At the time, we were working on a cable television series for the Outdoor Life Channel called To the Edge. These were TV shows that profiled professional athletes engaged in various treacherous feats on rock cliffs, big waves, and churning rapids. The show’s success, and our livelihood for that matter, depended on people staying home to watch television rather than going outside to engage in these activities themselves. So yes, signing this media contract was a tad hypocritical. But the idea of raising kids without the blare or distraction of the television in the background of our daily lives was appealing. We liked the thought of conversations at the dinner table and time for crafts, games, and baking cookies. We imagined raising kids who could engage in interesting conversations and make eye contact. With this in mind, we signed the dotted line.

  THINGS WERE EASIER BACK THEN

  Thinking back upon that time, I often wonder if we would have so readily agreed to restrict our media consumption had there been digital media to contend with. But the media environment was entirely different in the year 2000:

  •There were only 361 million internet users in the entire world. For perspective, that’s barely two-thirds of the size of Facebook today.27

  •Google was only two years old.

  •Neither Friendster nor MySpace (remember those?) had been invented or gone out of business.

  •Facebook, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, and Instagram didn’t exist.

  •Evan Spiegel, Snapchat’s founder, was only ten years old.

  •There were no iPods, iTunes, or iPhones. And we were a full decade away from the first iPad.

  The only media exposure we had to worry about limiting was television. Even that was no big deal. We relegated our one TV to the upstairs office, where it couldn’t tempt us, and went about our daily lives.

  And then, everything changed.

  As our daughter, and her sister who followed her by three years, approached middle school, our nondigital world’s simplicity started to fade into a distant memory. “Media” became more than just television. It became digital, and social, and mobile. Kids loved it, and parents weren’t ready for it. Including me.

  MEDIA PSYCHOLOGY TO THE RESCUE

  In 2006, while mindlessly scrolling through my email, which had begun to consume too many hours of my day, something caught my eye. An email from my alma mater announced a brand-new field of study: Media Psychology and Social Change. UCLA was offering four pathway courses that would lead to a master’s degree through Fielding Graduate University. Figuring this would be a great way to understand media’s transformation—and in turn help me help my kids navigate a new digital world—I enrolled, and for the next four years immersed myself in the study of media’s effects upon human behavior.

  As I worked my way through grad school, technological advancements seemed to occur weekly. The iPhone appeared in 2007, shortly followed by the iPad. In 2010, the Kaiser Family Foundation reported that the amount of time young people were spending with entertainment media had risen dramatically. They discovered that eight- to eighteen-year-olds were devoting an average of seven hours and thirty-eight minutes to using entertainment media across a typical day (more than fifty-three hours a week). And because youth were spending so much of that time “media multitasking” (using more than one device at a time), they were packing a total of ten hours and forty-five minutes worth of media content into those seven hours.28

  “Holy cow, that’s a lot of media,” I thought. Kids were spending more time with media than doing almost anything else—going to school, playing sports, engaging with their families, sometimes even sleeping. How, I wondered, were they navigating these new changes?

  Not very well, I would soon learn.

  DIGITAL DRAMA HITS HOME

  New digital technologies were finding their way into the lives of kids at Journey School, too, despite the school’s media contract. In 2010, when my oldest daughter was in eighth grade, the school experienced its first social media “incident.”

  Back then, Facebook was all the rage (remember, this was before Instagram or Snapchat, so young people were using Facebook to post pictures and communicate the daily events in their lives). Young people were using Facebook to post pictures and communicate the daily events in their lives. A new girl, Arial, joined my daughter’s class that year and introduced her classmates, including my daughter, to this social media platform. Arial was a prolific Facebooker. She posted pictures of herself and her small group of girlfriends every day, carefully selecting each photo to make sure she looked perfect (hair in place, pretty smile, etc.). Unfortunately, she did not extend the same level of care to her friends. In the same pictures they generally had funny expressions on their faces, hair out of place, or worse. Her friends caught on to this inconsideration pretty fast. I heard about it from my daughter, who found it funny. But another girl, named Reece, found no humor in it whatsoever.

  Reece was a vlogger. She kept a video blog of her daily events, sort of a virtual diary that was online and public. In one of these vlogs, she complained about the Facebook posts and the girl who posted them, saying she felt “stabbed in the back.” She even made the repeated hand motions of someone being stabbed. Parents caught wind of this video, and even those who didn’t see it heard about the stabbing bit and found the thought disturbing. Before long, parents reported this “cyberbullying” incident to the school, and Reece found herself in the principal’s office.


  Let’s pause here for a moment. Parental overreaction aside, what occurred was a minor incident, especially judged by today’s standards. It was normal teenage behavior that seemed different only because it was playing out in a new environment. Arial, the Facebooker, was dabbling with a new, exciting tool, probably without adult guidance. Plus, she was engaging in a form of “identity construction,” when adolescents try to figure out who they are and how to portray themselves to the world. Reece, the vlogger, was also learning to use new tools, recording and posting videos, also without adult guidance. These are wonderful new media skills! She was also expressing strong opinions and ideas, which is normal teenage behavior, too. Nothing these girls did was very bad or even wrong, but it was the first time technology use had disrupted our school, and it caught new principal Shaheer Faltas entirely off guard.

  “Because this was new terrain,” Faltas told me years later, “there was fear at all levels—among the parents, the teachers, and even the students. I’d only been at Journey for a few months and all of a sudden, I had this huge issue on my hands and a lot of questions. What constitutes cyberbullying? Is this the parents’ problem or the school’s? Why are students even using Facebook? And most importantly: What do we do to keep this, or an even worse incident, from happening again? These were all questions we had yet to answer.”29

  When this transpired, I had just finished my studies. Dr. Pamela Rutledge, a professor at Fielding Graduate University who had been my mentor and later became a dear friend, encouraged me to submit my final capstone for publication to the Journal of Media Literacy Education, and I did. My article, “New Media Literacy Education (NMLE): A Developmental Approach,”30 was published around the same time this digital drama was playing out among my daughter’s friends. The paper made a case for teaching kids the moral, ethical, and social guidelines necessary to be good online citizens. It was apparent that such an education was needed at my own daughters’ school, and I was excited.