I usually work on my blog in the mornings, when my son is first awake and supposed to get ready for school. Sometimes he wanders into the office and asks what I am writing about. I always let him read it.
He knows that I don't use his name, he knows that I don't post embarrassing stories about him and he knows that I don't share photos of him. His school does a good job of talking to children about digital literacy and privacy, so I can build upon those conversations at home.
Now that he is older, I will have to add more context to the conversation. I am, after all, human. And there will be a time when everything I do will seem embarrassing to him. And, he may not want me to post about him at all. So, we'll need to work on the boundaries now. I also need to make sure that he realizes that not everyone in his life will respect those guardrails: There will always be a well-meaning relative, friend or social organization that may post without permission.
I want him to start thinking about what he would be comfortable with in the long-term. That is a difficult ask of someone so young, but better he think about it before he starts Googling himself and is unpleasantly surprised by the results. Will he be fine with what he sees? How will he approach the conversation if he is uncomfortable with the results?
Privacy is a much bigger conversation than when he was three and I had to teach him to knock on closed doors.
Do your children know how much information you share about them? Tell me about it in the comments.
My son and I talk about his future phone use. He tells me that some kids in his grade already have their own phones. So we talk about how phone use should be limited at his age and that oversight is required. He still asks when he will be able to have his own phone, and I still don't have an answer yet. Lately I've been telling him that we may want to start him off with a flip phone that has no apps or games on it. (He is open to that.)
As we talk about his future technology use, I try to be mindful about how addictive it can be. I know so many adults who can't make it through a conversation without checking something on their phone. I have read about how apps trick our brains into going back for more and all the tips out there to help you disconnect (turn off all the color on your phone so it is black and white only; put your phone in a basket at dinner time and the person who checks it first has to clean up; give it a bedtime).
What I hadn't reviewed were the apps designed to keeping you off your phone.
But, they exist. A bunch of them. And, I for one like the idea of using an app to combat other apps. I am sure that if you are at the point in your phone use in which you are ready to face how much you really use it, then you may also be at the point where you are ready to change if you don't like the answer.
I spent a week a few years ago manually tracking my overall screen use, and got pretty good results. But I have always wondered if those results were influenced by the fact that I was monitoring my use that week.
Since I feel like my phone use has gone up since then, I am now thinking about downloading an app to track myself all the time and help me disconnect further.
Are you willing to try an app to keep you off your phone? Tell me in the comments.
I know a lot of sitcoms from the 1980s: The Cosby Show, Growing Pains, Webster, Small Wonder, Whose the Boss?, My Two Dads, Diff'rent Strokes, Family Ties, The Wonder Years...there are a lot of them. Their theme songs get stuck in my head sometimes and I can recall a fair amount of the plot lines. I can also recall that they were fun for the whole family to watch.
Today, my husband and I have only a handful of television shows that we watch together. And of those shows, I have found that there are very few that portray Dads in a positive light. (But in fairness, I don't think anyone should look to the characters of Game of Thrones for parenting advice.) But this isn't just because my husband and I have a particular taste in shows. No, the issue of doofus dads has become an epidemic.
The study in the above link monitored more than a dozen shows for the interactions between the father and his children and found that most TV dads were portrayed as an aimless character who gets outsmarted by family. The TV fathers often said hurtful things to their children and were incapable of looking after their family.
Not a great set of role models for today's children.
I don't have the answer, but maybe it's time to turn off the doofus dads, open up the TV vault and haul out one of those classic television sitcoms where fathers were respected just as much as moms.
What was your favorite television Dad growing up? Let me know in the comments.
As mentioned before, my Mother is really good with technology. She blogs, she texts and she FaceTimes with her grandchildren. It turns out that this is really good - not just that she is adept at embracing new things, but it's good for my relationship with her.
Through a series of surveys, researchers found that adult children and their parents had the highest satisfaction in their relationship when there were multiple communication channels to choose from. Long gone is the phrase, "Call your Mother," as it has been replaced with the notion that adults now text, tweet and post updates to their Mothers and - most importantly - Moms are using those communication channels back. (The same is true of Dads, of course.)
This news, unfortunately, may just bolster my Mom's argument that I need to join Facebook. It would provide another way for us to keep in touch. I don't know why I fight her - Mom is usually right.
What about you? What communication channels do you use to stay in touch with your parents? Share with me in the comments.
We recently took a 10-hour drive to New Jersey for a family reunion. (Not in one day. That's craziness.) This trip went significantly better than the last really long car trip we took because of several things:
- I wasn't the only adult in the car with my son. My husband was able to come, too.
- My mother (thanks, Mom!) came with us as well, so our son had his favorite traveling companion in the backseat with him.
- Electronic devices.
When my son got bored of using his LeapPad, he asked for the iPad. When he got tired of that, he asked to play games on Nana's Kindle. Granted, he did other things in the car as well (drew pictures, played games, told us stories), but because he was cooped up in the car for so long I relaxed my normal limited media use rules.
When we returned from the trip, I started thinking about my media rules and wondering (once again) if they are too strict. And then I read this study from the folks at UCLA, which shows that children who spend a significant time staring at electronic devices have difficulty reading other people's emotions.
What this is really about is social interaction. (Which, when you are in a car with people for 20 hours in a span of five days, is not really a problem.) But I think I'll leave our rules in place for now. My son gets less than the recommended 2 hours of screen time per day, and most of it is educational. Like many parents, I'm striving for that balance of integrating technology into his life without it becoming his preferred gateway to communication (as in, I do not want to receive text messages from him if we are in the same house.)
Any tips for distracting children while you are in the car would be greatly welcomed at this point. We are about to take another long trip in a few months, which means I should start planning now. Tell me in the comments.
On Fridays I let my son take his LeapPad to school with him so that he can play it in the afternoons. This is the compromise I've come up with as the school shows movies on Friday afternoons. I normally would not have a problem with movie time, except that the school often shows movies that are PG and not appropriate for my son to watch.
Since the school doesn't seem to have a set schedule of what movie they will show when (or any plans on changing their movie policy for only G-rated movies), I've opted him out of this activity. My son is quite happy with this exchange as he found the movies "upsetting" and enjoys his quiet time with his LeapPad.
Of course, I know that I am simply replacing one type of screen time for another. But at least this way, he won't be in tears upon pickup because he saw something in a movie that was scary.
As if I needed another reason to limit his screen time, a recent study in Scientific American has been published about the benefits of parents limiting both amount of time and content. This study, by Dr. Gentile and his research team, was particularly interesting because it started as a survey around parents' interactions with their children's media use. Seven months later, the researchers uncovered some surprising results, finding that the parents who were more involved in screen time limitations had children with less sleep deprivation, less risk of obesity and were getting better grades overall in school.
The causality is not that hard to explain: Every hour a child spends on a screen is an hour less spent on homework/sleep/exploring the world around them. But it is interesting to see the results of those hours accumulated over such a short (only seven months!) span of time.
This information is not likely to make me change my stance on Fridays. After all, I know the content on my son's LeapPad, so he can still enjoy his media time.
What's the last thing you let your child watch? Tell me in the comments.
