“My young child throws tantrums when we tell him to stop using the gadget. How is that related?”
“How can I manage my kids’ online use? They always say their homework and other school projects are online.”
“I find it hard to make them stop being online, especially when we are not at home.”
For the past years, these are the sentiments of parents that I encounter in my parenting talks. Many of them are left dumbfounded as to how they can manage their growing children’s digital use. I noted there are some who restrict their kids too much and a few others who are able to manage their children’s online use. Yet, there are many who just give in to the convenience of gadget use and allow their children to run their own online lives. For the past years, experts have been encouraging parents to exercise parental restrictions on their children’s gadget and technology use. However, continuing technological developments are taking our lives by storm. The gadgets and apps update so fast while parenting skills are not attuned to the realities of the digital age. We cannot remove the risks that digital media brings, and we cannot keep away our children from the present reality that many of their learning platforms are digitally connected. They are, in fact, labeled as digital citizens and we are at the age when many of our children’s skills and competencies will soon be measured by how digitally equipped they are. How then do we best deal with the kids’ online and gadget use?
Parental Mediation
Experts found that the best way to help our growing children achieve a healthy and balanced use of digital media is to use parental mediation. This works best when parents utilize their interpersonal communication skills to deal with the risks or negative effects of excessive digital media use on children. Here are some key points on how parents can help mediate their children’s digital use:
1. Model healthy digital habits. We cannot preach what we do not practice. And so the key for good mediation is for children to see their parents’ example. If they see us not using gadgets during family dinner time or when we are having family catch-up times, then it will be easy for us parents to ask our children to keep their gadgets away.
2. No one size fits all rule. Developmentally speaking, children have varied needs and realities. So in gadget use, what we instill in our grade school children is not the same rules and settings we use for our toddler. We also need to understand the child’s maturity and self-management skills—if they can be given more access or less. We cannot allow a preschooler to play the same games and apps used by an 11-year-old boy. The speed and content need to be considered here. We cannot expose grade school girls to a Netflix movie that a college teenager watches. It is simply not appropriate. We have to use our wisdom as parents and be in tune with the growing needs and skills of our children to ensure that we give neither too much nor too little. Balancing their online and offline engagements, as well as allowing what is developmentally appropriate for each child, would work best.
3. Parents should not be pressured to keep up with others. Just because your child’s friend bragged about a new iPad, or your co-parent mentioned a new app, does not mean that our children should have them too. I personally do not feel that I need to keep up with other families, even if my two children have mentioned their friends having this gadget or are allowed unlimited gadget use. We have the parenting skill to know and discuss these matters with our children in a way they would understand. It would be best for them to understand why it is important to have the restriction on gadget use in the family and what we hope to further instill in them.
It would be good to reflect where we are and how we are on the points mentioned above. The bottomline of parental mediation is a healthy parent-child relationship or a good personal connection. This will help bring about the parents’ knowledge of their child, as well as effective communication among them, to bridge the reality of digital children with family values. It is indeed possible to deliberately bridge the gap in dealing with our children’s digital life and having the strongest connection with them.
Reference: Parental Mediation Theory for the Digital Age (by Lynn Schofield Clark; https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2885.2011.01391.x)
This article first appeared in Family Reborn, April 2018, but has since been updated.