Raising Humans in a Digital World

by Diana Graber

  Age Matters

  While technology has altered the world, it hasn’t altered the time it takes a child’s brain to develop the ability to use technology well. That’s why social media age restrictions matter. Nearly every network—from Instagram to Snapchat, Facebook, and more—requires users to be at least thirteen years of age to open an account. Although I’d love to report that social media networks require this because they want to give children a chance to mature into their ethical thinking capabilities, that’s not why. Social media networks must abide by a law known as the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).

  Passed in 1998, COPPA protects every child under the age of thirteen. The act requires website and online service operators to provide notice and obtain permission from a child’s parents before collecting the child’s personal information, such as name, address, phone number, and screen name. Companies also cannot collect geolocation data that could identify the child’s street address, or store any files containing the child’s image or voice. Anything that can identify what the child is using, like cookies, IP addresses, or the unique device identifier (UDID) for mobile devices, is restricted by COPPA.

  When social network accounts are created for children under thirteen, or when children make up false birth dates, this federal law cannot protect their personal information from being collected and shared with third parties. Yet 60 percent of parents with children aged ten to fifteen say they would allow their children to pretend they are older to bypass these age restrictions.28

  Empathy

  It’s more important than ever to teach empathy from the very beginning, because our kids are going to need it.

  —MELINDA GATES29

  Years after the initial cyberincident that was the catalyst for Cyber Civics at Journey School, another minor social media transgression occurred. This time, a boy in seventh grade shot and posted a video on YouTube that made fun of a girl who had made fun of another boy IRL (“in real life”). Follow that? This contradictory mix of insensitivity (toward the girl) and empathy (for the boy who was made fun of) is typical of the confusing and complex nature of middle-school social life. Classmates who saw the video immediately brought it to the faculty’s attention and wanted to talk about in class. They hoped to keep it from escalating to an allegation of cyberbullying “that parents would freak out about.”

  When we discussed this incident in our Cyber Civics class the next day, students impressed me with their abundance of empathy—not only for the boy who had been made fun of in class and for the girl who was made fun of in the video, but also for the “bully” who posted the video. “We’ve all been there and made mistakes we’ve regretted later,” a girl in the class said to the boy who posted the video. “We forgive you, so let’s just move on.” And so they did.

  Talking about their online social lives in real life helps kids process human relationships they are still figuring out how to navigate. Not many schools or even families carve out time from a middle schooler’s busy day to do this, and that’s a shame.

  Empathy Needed

  Nearly every expert I spoke with while writing this book said if they could equip kids with one digital superpower, it would be empathy. Empathy is the ability to put oneself in another’s shoes. It encompasses perspective taking, and it allows you to feel what another is feeling. Educational psychologist Michele Borba, author of an indispensable parent’s guide to raising kind kids called UnSelfie: Why Empathetic Kids Succeed in Our All-About-Me World, explains that empathy is “the cornerstone for becoming a happy, well-adjusted, successful adult. It makes our children more likable, more employable, more resilient, better leaders, more conscience-driven, and increases their lifespans.”30

  Empathy is on a steep decline. Between 1979 and 2009, American college students’ scores on two measures of empathy dropped a whopping 40 percent, with the steepest decline occurring from 2000 onward.31 During the same time period, narcissism was shown to be on the rise.32

  I was curious to learn if empathy has continued to decline since 2009, the last year of this study, so I asked Borba. She told me that it has “continued to free-fall and seems to be falling faster in hypercompetitive countries and ones that are more technologically plugged-in as well.”33

  The researchers who conducted the empathy-dip study, Sara Konrath and Edward O’Brien from the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research, also believe technology may contribute to empathy’s decline. According to O’Brien, “The ease of having ‘friends’ online might make people more likely to just tune out when they don’t feel like responding to others’ problems, a behavior that could carry over offline.”34 The pair also noted that the generation of college students they studied grew up with video games, and a growing body of research is establishing that “exposure to violent media numbs people to the pain of others.”35

  Even so, Borba warned me to be careful about placing empathy’s plunge entirely on technology’s shoulders. “But, that said, technology is definitely playing a role because the gateway to empathy is emotional literacy.” Emotional literacy, she explained, is the ability to “read somebody’s face or body language and understand that he looks upset or he looks sad. Empathy is feeling with another person, and you can’t feel with another person unless you can read or understand that person’s emotions.”36

  Like ethical thinking, the capacity for empathy grows as the child grows. When an infant feels attachment to a parent or loving caregiver, the seeds of empathy are sown. Little by little, Borba explains, “as egocentricity fades, and social-centricity comes up, kids become more aware of others and are slowly able to cognitively step into another person’s shoes.” But children need experiences, nurturing, and deliberate attempts from adults to help these seeds grow, she says. “While children are hardwired for empathy, there are lots of things you can do to cultivate it. Intentionality, particularly in a plugged-in, trophy-driven world, is crucial.”37

  Growing Empathy

  Like almost everything related to technology, a direct correlation hasn’t been drawn between empathy’s decline and technology. But you don’t have to be a rocket scientist with a big research budget to figure out that digital interaction has some serious deficits. Lack of eye contact, facial expression, human touch, and voice intonation are a few. Learning how to read and understand these human cues are empathy-building experiences. In the absence of such practice, it stands to reason that kids might end up with an empathy deficit. Don’t believe me? Fair enough. Here’s a study to prove it.

  In 2014, scientists from UCLA studied two groups of sixth graders from a Southern California public school. One group spent five days at a nature camp just outside of Los Angeles, which didn’t allow students to use digital devices. The other group of students used their digital devices as usual. After only five days at camp, the non-tech-using kids showed significant improvement in their abilities to read facial expressions and nonverbal cues, as compared to the other group of kids. Which means that those kids—the digital device–using ones—were less adept at reading human emotions.

  According to the study’s lead author, Yalda Uhls, “If you’re not practicing face-to-face communication, you could be losing important social skills.”38

  Raising Empathetic Kids in a Plugged-In World

  How do you raise empathetic kids in a plugged-in world? According to Borba, you start early. “Number one, put down your own phone. Relationships are key,” she says. “Empathy grows from face-to-face connections with your child.” She recommends that parents do the following:

  •Set up digitally unplugged family time.

  •Teach kids to look into others’ eyes. “It helps to teach your children to note the eye color of those they are speaking with,” says Borba.

  •Talk emotions. Point them out at every age, but particularly when children are young.

  •Read books and see movies that are emotionally charged. “A great way to build moral imagination is to step into another person
’s shoes,” she says.

  •Take advantage of mealtimes, bedtimes, and carpool to connect emotionally with children.

  “Remember,” says Borba, “there are no take-backs in parenting.” All of these activities will help your child gain face-to-face communication skills in a very plugged-in world.

  CYBER CIVICS MOMENTS

  Tell Stories

  We are our stories.

  —DANIEL PINK, A WHOLE NEW MIND

  One of the most effective ways to build human skills in digital kids is also one of the simplest. Tell stories. Stories are how humans make sense of a confusing world. Stories inspire us, they guide us, they entertain and soothe us. In A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future, author Daniel Pink argues that the ability to understand and tell stories—those about ourselves and those we tell to our ourselves—is a skill needed now more than ever.39 Dr. Pamela Rutledge agrees, writing in Psychology Today, “Stories are the pathway to engaging our right brain and triggering our imagination. By engaging our imagination, we become participants in the narrative. We can step out of our own shoes, see differently, and increase our empathy for others. Through imagination, we tap into creativity that is the foundation of innovation, self-discovery, and change.”40

  Even kids understand the power of story. Just look at the features they love most on the apps they use. “Snapchat Stories”—created with pictures and videos taken throughout the day, strung into a compelling narrative that users share with their friends—is a wildly popular feature. Every Snapchat-using kid I know tells a “Snapchat Story” daily. It’s such a popular feature that Instagram, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Medium, Google, and others have copied it. A quick spin through YouTube reveals countless videos crafted by budding storytellers. I learned from my young assistant that kids surreptitiously tell stories through their Instagram feeds. By uploading photos in a certain order, or that share a complementary color scheme, images viewed together form a compelling picture or story that relays a larger narrative.

  Telling stories to kids, especially young ones, is a delightfully easy digital on-ramp. It’s how the teachers at Journey School sow the seeds of early digital literacy in our students. From the moment children enter the warm comfort of a kindergarten classroom, they are immersed in stories that carry moral lessons—from fairy tales and fables in the earliest grades to Nordic and ethnic myths as they get older. To the outside observer this may not look like “digital literacy,” but it is. Rich, imaginative stories with moral lessons help children build the understanding and empathy they’ll need as they begin connecting with countless online strangers with differing worldviews, opinions, and expression modes. And, let’s be honest: Who doesn’t love a good story?

  Here’s what you can do:

  1.Tell stories the old-fashioned way, by reading a book or from memory. Or you can read an ebook on a digital device. Any way you do it, be sure to choose stories with strong characters and moral lessons. You can start with some age-old favorites, like Aesop’s fables: “The Tortoise and the Hare” (teaches persistence and humility), “The Ant and the Grasshopper” (teaches personal responsibility), or “The Honest Woodcutter” (teaches that honesty is the best policy).

  2.Don’t ask your children too many questions about the stories you tell. Don’t ask for their analysis or judgment either. Instead, let the moral lessons sink in. Help your children build moral imagery by encouraging them to draw pictures about the stories or, even better, role-play the stories with them. As Journey School’s Shelley Glaze-Kelley points out, “Young kids can’t ethically reason or abstractedly think yet, so they need to play moral lessons out through someone else. That’s why we do a lot of storytelling or reading books where the characters, whether they are human or animals or whatnot, have problems to solve. This is a hundred times more powerful than an adult trying to explain right from wrong. They will draw upon these lessons as they get older, and especially when they go online.”41

  Send Email

  One of my most surprising discoveries as a middle-school teacher has been how little students know about email etiquette. Sometimes I ask students to email me their homework, and am aghast at the lack of salutation, the textspeak, and their ridiculous or downright cringeworthy email addresses. How long, I’d wonder, before they would be embarrassed by their own email illiteracy?

  As a kid, I remember being taken through the painstaking mechanics of writing an actual letter. Although today’s kids may never write or send a physical letter, they will compose thousands of emails or other digital correspondence. Employers, teachers, and business colleagues will expect to see proper composition, correct spelling, and sentences uncluttered with lols and emojis. You can teach your children this skill when they are young, as you concurrently demonstrate how to use technology to connect with others in a meaningful way.

  One of the safest ways to introduce young kids to email is through a platform designed specifically for them. Brittany Oler is the cofounder of KidsEmail, a company that offers such a service. She explained that while KidsEmail works like a regular email client, such as Gmail, it also offers safety features that parents like. “We keep kids from seeing inappropriate messages or spam,” says Oler. “Parents can also be copied on all of their children’s communication. But probably the biggest thing parents like is that they can set up a contact list, so their kids can only email, say, Grandma or Grandpa or a few select friends. It’s a great way to let kids start using technology to communicate with others, but in a safe environment.”42

  Whether you decide to use KidsEmail or Gmail, you can follow these steps to get started.

  1.Open an email account for your child. This is a good time to explain why she should choose an email account name that won’t embarrass her in ten years. For instance, marydoe@gmail.com is preferable to marygoesbananasformonkeys@gmail.com.

  2.Together with your child, make a contact list. Decide on the friends and family members you are comfortable having him communicate with.

  3.Teach your children how to construct an email. Show her how to type her email topic in the subject line. Teach her how to write complete sentences, and tell her she should spell words correctly and use proper grammar. Finally, teach her how to address an adult (“Dear Mr.” or “Dear Ms.”) and how to sign off (“Sincerely” or “Warmly” work well). Because so many kids today start texting before they ever use email, the abbreviations and slang that pass for appropriate communication on that platform are seeping into email communication. That won’t go over so well when Mary enters high school and has to email her English teacher to explain why her homework is late.

  4.Engage your family and friends as email buddies for your children. KidsEmail suggests making this fun: Encourage these buddies to send your children a list of things to find (like a tree, a flower, a red pen). Have your kids take photos of these items and email the pictures to their buddies. This teaches children how to write and send appropriate emails, and how to add attachments, too.

  “There’s so many fun things to do with email,” says Oler, “but most importantly, it’s a great way to introduce kids to reading and writing. Those basic skills are needed even on a technological platform.”43

  Engage in Random Acts of Online Kindness

  It’s never too early to teach your children how to be kind online. Tap into their naturally empathetic natures when they are young, and show them how to demonstrate that kindness online. An easy way to do this is by showing children how you express kindness online. Support businesses you like, review good books you’ve read, or post things that make people smile. Here are some ideas:

  1.Has your family recently eaten at a restaurant that served you a great meal or offered excellent service? Did you stay at a hotel that you really liked? Did you visit a local business and find the proprietor super helpful? If so, together with your child, go online and give these establishments or services a good review or rating. Use Google ratings, or a rating app like Yelp or TripAdvisor. Explain t
o your children that when you give an establishment or service a positive review—a thoughtful, kind act on your part— it helps these businesses get more customers and more business.

  2.If you read a book together that you like, rate the book to tell the author how much you liked it. Amazon is a great place to do this. Explain to your children that when others see your positive review, they may decide to buy the book, too.

  3.Finally, as your children get older, let them watch you scroll through your Instagram or Facebook feeds and “like” photos from friends or relatives, or posts that tell positive stories or spread kind messages. Explain to your children that your “like” is the equivalent of a vote— it’s telling the online world that you approve of this positive photo or message, and it’s spreading those positive vibes far and wide.

  PART TWO

  A Sturdy Structure

  Chapter 3

  Reputation

  The way to gain a good reputation is to endeavor to be what you desire to appear.

  —SOCRATES1

  Harvard is one of the most prestigious colleges in the world and possibly the most difficult one to get into. Imagine the hard work, dedication, and sizable helping of smarts it takes for a student to earn acceptance to this prestigious Ivy League school. An amazing accomplishment to be sure. Now imagine a kid losing this hard-earned acceptance, all because of something he posted online during a moment of adolescent stupidity. Wouldn’t that be heartbreaking?

  That’s what happened in the spring of 2017. Harvard rescinded offers of acceptance to at least ten incoming freshmen because of messages these young people posted in a “private” Facebook group (yep, the same social network former Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg created in his dorm room).