Raising Humans in a Digital World

by Diana Graber

  I did watch her video, and in the corner of the screen, capturing Maeve’s presentation on her phone, was her mother—Liz Repking of Cyber Safety Consulting.

  Surprised that Repking hadn’t shamelessly bragged about her daughter when we spoke a few weeks earlier, I called to ask about Maeve’s project. “Well, that all started years ago,” Repking said, “when I told Maeve that I wanted her to start journaling over the summer. She just looked at me like I was crazy.”11

  That’s when Maeve’s dad stepped in to help her set up a blog, where she could share her love of baking. Although he initially taught Maeve how to set up a website—“they spent hours together working on it,” says Repking—today Maeve manages the site herself, and uploads all her own recipes, photos, and more. “She’ll go in her room and spend lots of time tweaking things,” Repking told me. “But her passion is the baking. Technology is simply the means to share that passion.”

  “What we have discovered is this: Kids are capable of really good things, but what they’re looking for is an adult who will support them, who will guide them, and really push them,” Soeth informed me.12

  After that, watch them fly.

  IF YOU WANT YOUR KIDS TO FLY, GIVE THEM WINGS

  Most parents looking for digital parenting help aren’t regaled with stories about kids doing awesome stuff online. I wasn’t. I remember attending my first “online safety” presentation almost ten years ago. The speaker, who was the owner of a local computer repair company, had a reputation for giving presentations that were engaging and informative. I went to one in my neighborhood, pen and paper in hand, and found myself surrounded by nearly two hundred other anxious parents. For two hours we sat at the edges of our seats as he recounted one horror story after another about cyberbullying, predators, pornography, and so forth. It was terrifying!

  I drove home that night with the notes I’d scribbled shoved down into my pocket. They included a long list of “bad apps” he told us to go home and “immediately delete from our kids’ devices.” I wondered what the success rate was of parents who did so. How long before those curious kids went right back to the cookie jar their parents had hidden in a new location?

  That was a long time ago, and one might presume we’ve come a long way since. Wrong. Just last week, Peter Kelley, who works with me, got a call from a local community group seeking a presentation for middle school girls and their parents. He was prepared to lead them through one of our digital reputation activities when he received a second phone call from the organizer, who wanted to confirm he was going to “scare the hell out of the girls.” Kelley politely explained, “That’s not what we do,” because, in our experience, teaching kids through fear is counterproductive. Fear elicits a physiological reaction in humans known as the “fight or flight response.” Though kids probably won’t “fight” you during a presentation, mentally they will take “flight,” meaning they’ll respond to the terrifying things you tell them by not listening. So if you want kids to learn something, scaring the hell out of them doesn’t work.

  Kelley lost the gig. The woman on the other end of the line thanked him and hired another, scarier guy for the job.

  “Here’s the problem,” says NAMLE’s Michele Ciulla Lipkin. “We spend most of our time worried about the negative stuff online, and we spend hardly any time celebrating and empowering the good stuff. Why is it with technology that all we ever do is think about the worst-case scenario? Why do we do that to our kids? Why do we do that to ourselves? And why does the media only cover that?”13

  In addition to her full-time job with NAMLE, Ciulla Lipkin regularly visits schools to deliver her “Parenting in the Digital Age” presentation. She starts her talks by assessing parents’ feelings about tech and has found, as have I, parental angst to be at an all-time high. “I’m amazed at the struggles parents are still having,” she said. “I’ve had parents moved to tears because all they do is fight with their kids about media. Then when I talk to the kids, I can’t believe how nervous they are about digital life, all because their parents are petrified. It really doesn’t have to be this hard.”

  Ciulla Lipkin believes the reason parenting in the digital age feels this hard is because it’s so new. “There’s always been a disconnect between adults and teens,” she says, “but now the changes in society are happening so fast, we are really struggling to figure out how to parent in a new world.”

  As three-time Pulitzer winner Thomas Friedman puts it in his newest book, Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations, “the rate of technological change is now accelerating so fast that it has risen above the average rate at which most people can absorb all these changes.”14 As a result, most people can’t keep up. Friedman’s solution to this conundrum is “dynamic stability,” which he likens to riding a bicycle. Like riding a bike, you cannot stand still. You must keep pedaling.

  Since I’ve never met a bicycle metaphor I didn’t like, let me take Friedman’s a bit further and apply it to my favorite kind of bike, a mountain bike. On a steep downhill, forward momentum is your best friend. The worst thing you can do is take it too slowly. The faster you ride, even pushing yourself to a pace that feels uncomfortable, the more successfully you’ll navigate the terrain.

  Digital parenting is the same. You have to move forward, even if it feels uncomfortable to open a Snapchat account or to try Minecraft. And you’ve got to look beyond the depressing research, to see what your own children are really doing, or could be doing, online.

  As Ciulla Lipkin put it, “For every study you read about kids being addicted to social media, you will find another one saying that they are empowered by social media. So that’s the hard part. There’s a lot of stuff we just don’t know.”

  Let’s look at what we do know. According to Ciulla Lipkin, “We know we spend a lot of time with media, and we know that media is really important to us. We know, without a shadow of a doubt, that media impacts us. We know that can be positive or that can be negative. We know there is a risk with media use, and we know there’s opportunity. We also know parents are really worried and overwhelmed.”

  “And that,” she says, “is all we really know.”15

  GO WITH WHAT YOU KNOW

  The main objective of this book has been to equip you with tools to help your children build a healthy relationship with technology. While you don’t need any technical skills for this job, you do need to draw upon what you already know about being a parent.

  “The biggest thing that parents undervalue is their life experience as human beings,” said Soeth. “They’ve all been in relationships. They’ve had good friends; they’ve had bad friends. They’ve had people who’ve been fake and people who are real coming in and out of their lives for however long they’ve been on this earth. But I think there’s a wall that goes up when technology is involved. Parents think, ‘I don’t get tech; therefore I can’t help you.’”16

  Soeth believes parents perceive a distinct difference between online life and offline life. “But for young people, there’s no online and offline,” he said. “It’s all life.” And kids today need their parents’ help to navigate their lives.

  Ciulla Lipkin concurs, “So often I see parents give their power away to technology. They forget that most of the issues that arise with kids and technology or social media are not technology issues—they’re social issues.”

  Let me provide a few examples:

  •A parent says, “I tell my kids they are not allowed to watch [fill in the blank]. Then they go over to Timmy’s house, and they’re watching it there, and I know they are lying to me!” Ciulla Lipkin’s response is, “Okay, that’s not a technology issue—that’s a lying issue. How would you respond if they were lying to you about something else?”

  •A parent says, “My daughter is upset about something that happened on Snapchat, and I can’t help her.” Ciulla Lipkin responds, “Of course you can. Didn’t you ever experience teenage drama?”

/>   •Here’s one of my favorites: A parent says, “My nine-year-old daughter really wants a Snapchat account, and I don’t know what to say to her.” My response: “That’s easy. Say ‘N-O.’ It’s a tried-and-true response that has stood the test of time. When your nine-year-old dissolves into tears and says, ‘But you don’t understand!’ you say, ‘Yes, I do! When I was fourteen, I really wanted to drive a car, but the rules were that you had to be sixteen. I waited, and I survived. So will you.”

  See how easy that is? Draw upon your own hard-earned wisdom, gleaned from years on this earth, to help your children navigate new terrain. Empathize with them and have conversations. Did your teenage son just break up with his first girlfriend? Chances are he is experiencing the additional heartbreak of seeing posts and pictures that show how much fun she’s having without him—or worse, with someone else. Talk to him about it. Does your daughter spend more time playing video games than reading books? Maybe she’s learning something via the game that she’s not learning elsewhere. Or maybe she’s experiencing a lot of stress at school, and gaming is providing a respite. Or perhaps she finds it easier to connect with peers via her game than she does in real life. Talk to her about it. Dig deep into your own memories to remember when you got dumped by a girlfriend/boyfriend, or watched a TV show that taught you something new, or found it easier to talk to peers on the phone rather than face-to-face. You can do this.

  Remember, you are not in this alone. Parents everywhere are struggling with these same issues. Talk to them, too.

  “I think parents have to open up a dialogue about these issues in their communities and find support,” says Ciulla Lipkin. “Parents and schools have to work together, because we no longer live in a world where we can separate home and school. Administrators must support teachers getting professional development, because teachers have to understand these issues, too. We all have to ask if we are having these conversations in our communities.”

  FORWARD!

  When the time draws near for me to say goodbye to another crop of students I’ve been lucky enough to shepherd through three years of Cyber Civics lessons, I cross my fingers and pray I’ve adequately prepared them for whatever the technological future brings. Who knows what lies ahead? Flying, driverless Uber rides that deliver pizza? An internet searchable with the blink of an eye? Thin, plastic membranes you can stick on your body that turn into tiny computer displays? (That last one is already a thing.)

  I figure the best way to prepare students for an uncertain technological future is to inspire them with stories of how other young people have used the technology at their disposal in positive and productive ways. I used to find my best stories by drawing upon other cultures. For example, I’d tell them about the Arab Spring, the wave of pro-democracy protests and uprisings that took place in the Middle East and North Africa in 2010 and 2011. Students there used social media to orchestrate the rapid and relatively peaceful disintegration of authoritarian regimes. Facebook provided a place where they could organize, meet, and share ideas. They even used Facebook to orchestrate what many consider Egypt’s first organized protest, which resulted in an eighteen-day, near countrywide stand against Egyptian president Mubarak. President Obama lauded technology’s role in the uprising, which resulted in Mubarak leaving office, and praised young Egyptians who used “their own creativity and talent, and technology to call for a government that represented their hopes and not their fears.”17

  Today, I don’t have to reach beyond U.S. shores to find an inspiring story to share. I’ve begun telling my students how Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students in Parkland, Florida, used their tools to spur significant social and cultural change.

  When a mass shooting on their high school campus on Valentine’s Day 2018 left seventeen students and teachers dead, distraught students decided they wanted to advocate for new gun-control laws, so they picked up their devices and got to work. At first, they used their phones to capture, in real time and in graphic detail, the horrific scene during the shooting and their reactions to it, and then shared those online. Next, students posted their thoughts to Facebook and Instagram, which led to on-air appearances and passionate speeches that went viral. Soon, even more students took to social media, especially Twitter, subtweeting and retweeting with zeal. The #NeverAgain movement was born and along with it an army of civically engaged youth. Using the social media savvy they are often derided for using, students commandeered the gun-control conversation and demanded immediate action from lawmakers. In the time it would have taken the average adult to compose a press release, these kids brought more awareness to this issue than all the politicians in Washington combined.

  Don Tapscott, author of Grown Up Digital, told the New York Times that he believes today’s teenagers are better communicators than any previous generation. “They didn’t grow up being the passive recipients of somebody else’s broadcast. . . . They grew up being interactors and communicators.”18 In the same article, clinical psychologist Wendy Mogel, author of Voice Lessons for Parents: What to Say, How to Say It, and When to Listen, had this to say about today’s youth: “They’re courageous, energetic, optimistic, and really smart.”19

  I agree. We entirely underestimate young people when we write them off as unengaged, apathetic, or depressed. Worse, defining an entire generation by the headlines we read about them displays our ignorance about the complex—and yes, sometimes depressing—world they have no choice but to grow up in. A world that, whether we like it or not, is inextricably entwined with technology. Lest we forget, it’s our generation that made connected devices a part of theirs. We thrust gadgets into their little palms with virtually no guidance, no role models, and sometimes even years before they were cognitively prepared to use them well. Even so, many young people are doing pretty darn well despite being left to their own devices. How many more would do even better, I wonder, with a little help from us?

  BEING HUMAN IN THE DIGITAL AGE

  One late May weekend, during a Cyber Civics workshop at Journey School, a visiting teacher asked our eighth graders, “What was the most important digital skill you learned?” None of the students answered right away, which had me kind of worried. After what seemed an eternity, Seb, a thoughtful young man with dark brown eyes, responded, “We didn’t learn digital skills.” I could see the teacher was as surprised by his answer as I was. To my relief, he continued, “We learned life skills.” He could tell the teacher still didn’t understand. “Basically,” he said, “we learned how to be human, online and off.”

  In this age of algorithms and bots, learning how to be human is more challenging than ever. Text messages are curt, Siri doesn’t expect a thank you, and autoresponders can’t detect when the sender needs a kind word or a hug. To raise kids who will wield technology with empathy, understanding, thoughtfulness, compassion—and all the other age-old human capacities that make life worth living—we must sow the seeds of each of these qualities offline, when kids are young. That way, as they get older and smarter, they’ll have these essential human qualities to draw upon and use where they are really needed, in the online world. Perhaps they’ll also remember to put down their devices now and then and collect the rewards of offline life, like real hugs, genuine smiles, and hearty high fives. I hope this book can help you help your children do just that.

  Wrapping up this chapter, I wanted to find an easy-to-remember phrase, a simple motto, or a snappy synopsis to summarize what it means to be human in a digital world—something you could tell your kids, that they’d get right away. Since I’d started to worry about my caffeine intake a couple of chapters ago, I’d switched to drinking Kombucha—a “healthy” alternative that still delivers a moderate dose of caffeine—and in a moment of boredom read the label on the back of the bottle in front of me. Lo and behold, there under “Words of Enlightenment” was the short maxim I’d hoped for. Coincidentally, I knew who had authored the words, too: Conrad Anker. Anker is a climbing buddy of my husband. Not the “let’
s hit the climbing gym” kind of climbing buddy, but rather the “we’re going on an expedition, and with any luck we’ll return in two months with all our fingers and toes intact” sort of buddy. Over the years, they’ve survived some big mountain, high-altitude suffer-fests together—from first ascents in Antarctica’s Queen Maud Land, to filming a retracing of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s epic journey across South Georgia Island. Anker’s illustrious climbing career has catapulted him to international recognition, so I imagine his experiences have provided plenty of opportunity to ponder life’s big questions. Dangling on a rope several thousand feet off the deck tends to give one clarity.

  So here, courtesy of Anker, is the perfect maxim to remind your kids— and you—how to be human in a digital age. Simply:

  “Be Good. Be Kind. Be Happy.”

  Epilogue

  If you’ve read through this book and completed all the “Cyber Civics Moments” with your children, your work is finished! You understand the importance of laying a strong foundation of social and emotional skills, and you know how to help your children build a sturdy structure with four strong pillars that will withstand any digital storms that may blow their way. You’ll encourage them to engage with online communities in positive and productive ways, and you understand this all takes a ton of time and effort. Is it worth it?

  I used to wonder that myself and decided the best way to find out was to check in with my first crop of Cyber Civics students, starting way back in 2010, my daughter Piper’s class. Essentially my guinea pigs, these kids enthusiastically participated in any activity I challenged them with, as we figured out together which ones worked best. Did it have an impact on their actual digital lives, I wondered, now that they are in college or working?