Raising Humans in a Digital World

by Diana Graber

  This is a great activity for families to do together. The goal is to make a list you can refer to when your children inevitably tell you they have nothing to do. (This list will be useful for the next activity as well.) Here’s how to create your family’s list:

  1.Get a large piece of blank white paper. Write “100 Non-Screen Activities” at the top. Together with your children, think of all the things you can do as a family, or that they can do alone, that do not involve a screen. Your family could go to the park, the beach, or the zoo. Your children could paint, draw, skateboard, or hike. (These activities will vary according to each child’s age and interests.) They could write a letter to Grandma, make dinner with you, or walk the dog. The point is to come up with one hundred ideas and write them down.

  2.Post this list in a prominent place in your house. Encourage your children to refer to it when they’re tempted to pick up a device, or when they’ve been online too long. You also can refer to it when you find yourself doing something like scrolling mindlessly through your Facebook feed. Use the list to inspire your family to do fun, non-screen activities together and alone. Your kids may even find these new offline experiences so pleasurable and dopamine-inducing that they end up craving a good hike over a game of Fortnite. Who knows?

  Weigh In

  It is surprising how all the moments spent online—checking text messages, listening to podcasts, getting directions, looking at social media—add up. This activity will help your children (and you) see their digital diets. Getting a clear picture of how they spend their time—online and offline—helps kids discover how healthy, or unhealthy, their diets may be. You can “weigh in” by completing the following steps:

  1.Select a typical weekend day, and have your children write down everything they do, from the time they wake up until the moment they go to sleep. (You should do this, too!) Remind them to notice what they do when they first wake up. (Ask, “Do you grab your phone and check for text messages?”) Tell them to think about what they do in the car. (Ask, “Do you listen to music on a device? Check social media?”) During dinner, remind them to notice where they place their attention. (Ask, “Are you watching TV? Playing a video game?”)

  2.Next, have your children sort all their activities into categories. Make this easy by suggesting they use the following categories to organize their data regarding where they spent their time:

  •On a phone

  •Watching television

  •On a computer

  •On an iPad, Kindle, e-reader

  •On a video-game player

  •Engaged in outdoor activities

  •Sleeping or eating

  •Other activities

  3.Have your children add up the time in each category, and if they are ten or older, show them how to convert that data into a chart (a bar chart or pie chart works well). This is a terrific math skill! The result will help them visualize how their time was spent.

  4.After you’ve analyzed this data, talk about it! Discuss their tech-life balance. (Ask, “Did you spend more time with digital media than you expected? Less time? What would you change?”) Explain how technology is designed to capture and hold our attention. You’d be surprised at how kids respond to this information. No kid wants to be manipulated, whether by a parent, teacher, or device. They like having agency over their time, online and offline. Finally, remember to be nonjudgmental. Approach this as a scientific exploration, rather than an opportunity to give a lecture. Make decisions together about how they might improve their digital diets going forward.

  Take the Unplug Challenge

  By now, the purpose of unplugging should be obvious. Unless your children (and you) experience what it’s like not to be plugged in 24/7, they won’t know or remember what they’re missing, or learn that they can survive. Taking this challenge may even help them (and you) discover things they like to do that have nothing to do with a screen. Anything could happen.

  1.Challenge your children to give up all digital media for twenty-four hours. This includes smartphones, computers, tablets, television, games, etc. They should try to survive a full day without looking at a screen at home, school, or a friend’s house.

  2.Have your children keep track of all the non-screen activities they engage in during this twenty-four-hour period. If they need help thinking of non-screen activities to do, have them refer to the offline life list they made during the activity above. They should also jot down all the challenges they face and opportunities presented by this activity.

  3.Talk about the activity. Ask questions like the following: Was it difficult? Easy? What did you miss the most? The least? What did you learn? Would you do it again? What, if anything, will you change about your screen time in the future?

  As Joni Siani told me, “We forget that today’s kids have been totally socialized in a digital world. They really need opportunities to compare and contrast plugged-in and unplugged life, and maybe they’ll like being unplugged better. The second a college kid says, ‘Hey, talking is cooler than texting!’ the thirteen-year-olds will want to be just like them, and next so will the fifty-year-olds. Now wouldn’t that be something?”42

  Chapter 5

  Relationships

  I love the feeling of having all my friends in my pocket.

  —SEVENTH-GRADE STUDENT

  “Ms. Graber, we have a problem.”

  This is how Journey School’s sixth-grade teacher greeted me one Monday morning when I arrived to teach her class. “We had a cyberbullying incident over the weekend,” she told me. “I’m hoping you will talk to the students about it during their lesson today.”

  “Dang,” I thought to myself. That day we were scheduled to begin a five-lesson unit called “Cyberbullying and Digital Drama.” I’d been looking forward to guiding her students through sequential activities that would help them identify online cruelty and give them strategies they could use if and when they encountered it. Now it appeared I’d be starting these lessons a day too late.

  Here’s what happened: A student in the class had opened a “fake” Instagram account. Kids call this a “Finsta” or “Finstagram,” a combination of the words “fake” and “Instagram.” It is not uncommon for kids to open fake social media accounts, in addition to “real” ones, to have a place to post and comment freely, unconstrained by the negative impact their activities might have upon their digital reputations. Eventually, their “friends”—online and offline—identify the owners of these fake accounts, but that doesn’t stop kids from trying to be anonymous online. In this case, students had already figured out that the fake account’s owner was someone in their class, and through that account had posted something mean and inappropriate on another kid’s feed.

  After being apprised of the situation, I took a deep breath, entered the classroom, and found a somber group of students. They confirmed what their teacher had told me—someone had cyberbullied a girl named Rosa, and she had evidence to prove it. Rosa, a smart, confident preteen who anyone would think twice about bullying online or offline, told me that she had heeded advice I’d given the class a few weeks earlier. She’d taken a screenshot of the evidence and even sent it to Instagram. Instagram, she reported with indignation, had not responded to her complaint. Then she asked me if I would like to see the evidence.

  Bracing myself for what I imagined I was about to view, I said yes. Here is what she showed me:

  Rosa is

  Struggling to maintain a straight face, I explained to the class why this post, in which Rosa was being called “hot” (or “lit” as kids would say), falls short of “cyberbullying” (which, they were about to learn, is identifiable by these characteristics—it’s online, intentional, repeated, and harmful). Even if the post felt hurtful to Rosa, I explained, chances are that was not the sender’s intent. Additionally, I told them that Instagram would not view this as “cyberbullying.” Its terms of use state that users must not “defame, stalk, bully, abuse, harass, threaten, impersonate, or intimida
te” one another.1 Instagram doesn’t intervene when users comment on one another’s “hotness.”

  The students seemed satisfied with my explanations, and I was able to start the day’s lesson—“What Is Cyberbullying?”—with this incident providing the perfect introduction.

  But that’s not the end of this story. The next week when I arrived to teach the same class, someone else was waiting for me at the door. This time it was a student named George. One of the smallest boys in the class, George had one of the biggest personalities and typically needed constant reminding to keep still or be quiet. Yet on this day he was subdued. “Ms. Graber,” he asked in a hushed voice, “may I have a word with you in private?” I told him he could as we had a few free moments before class.

  “I’m the one who opened the fake account on Instagram.”

  Embarrassed, he looked down at his feet and continued, “You see, I sort of like Rosa and was embarrassed to tell her in person.”

  Once again, I found myself desperately trying to maintain my composure. I thanked George for trusting me with his secret, but also warned him it was likely his classmates would find out he had opened the fake account because “nothing online stays private for long.”

  “I know, they’re already figuring it out,” he said. “It was stupid. I won’t do it again.”

  REAL PEOPLE, REAL FEELINGS

  In addition to its excellent entertainment value, this incident provided three important lessons:

  1.Cyberbullying is a serious digital-age issue (which we’ll address in this chapter), yet the term is sometimes used too broadly. There’s a difference between actual cyberbullying (remember, it’s online, intentional, repeated, and harmful), digital drama (“mean” online behavior that falls short of harmful), old-fashioned teasing, and miscommunication. Consider a sleepover photo that lands on Instagram. To a child not invited to the event, this image might scream, “You got left out!” While this might feel like cyberbullying to the left-out child (or sometimes even to the parents of the left-out child), it would be inaccurate to label it as such. Even worse, it might be unfair to call the child who posted the photo a bully. All kids make mistakes, and labels can stick. It’s important to remember that every child is different and how he responds to online cruelty, real or imagined, is unique to that child. Complicated? You bet.

  2.Making and maintaining peer relationships has always been a tricky business. Today this developmental task is even more challenging, as it’s taking place in an environment devoid of social cues, facial expressions, or adult role models to provide guidance.

  3.Finally, and most importantly, the online activities of digital kids always provide teachable moments ideal for addressing all of the above, without being preachy or pedantic.

  When George shared the secret of his crush with me, I was, coincidentally, about to teach his class a lesson called “Real People, Real Feelings.” During our hour together, we explored how the internet provides ample opportunities for people to hide behind avatars, screen names, and even fake accounts. Psychologists call this online disinhibition, which is the “loosening (or complete abandonment) of social restrictions and inhibitions that would otherwise be present in normal face-to-face interactions.”2 George and his classmates learned that because digital media leaves out many of the real-life social cues and facial expressions that prompt us to know how someone is feeling, it’s easy to forget that real people—with real feelings— lie behind all online interactions.

  As if by magic, my students’ social media lives often align perfectly with whatever I’m about to teach them that day. This serendipity makes our discussions all the more meaningful and memorable. This can happen at home, too! Granted, your children might not be as willing or eager to tell you about posting their innermost feelings on Instagram, but I bet they would tell you about a friend or classmate doing so. The trick is to open the door to discussions about online relationships, and to leave it wide open.

  DIGITAL RELATIONSHIPS

  What kids love most about social media—that it lets them socialize with others at almost any time of the day or night—is also what most frightens parents. Fear that their children might connect with unsavory characters online is fueled by the media, which is littered with stories about online relationships gone dangerously awry. Here are some headlines I ran across on just one day:

  •“Swedish Man Convicted Over ‘Online Rape’ of Teens Groomed into Performing Webcam Sex Acts”3

  •“A Fourteen-Year-Old Girl Sexted on Her Crush. She May Have to Register as a Sex Offender”4

  •“Sutton Teen’s Suicide Raises Awareness of Cyberbullying”5

  •“Reports of Children Being Groomed on the Internet Have Increased Fivefold in Four Years”6

  •“Top Health Concern for Parents: Bullying, Cyberbullying, and Internet Safety”7

  Cyberbullying, sexting, online grooming, sextortion, predators, and more. These are the potential risks that make most parents want to take their kids’ phones and bury them in the backyard. Thankfully, these are not activities most kids engage in when they are online. More commonly, online kids are doing what offline kids have done for eons—they are connecting with their peers.

  SOCIALIZING IS THE WORK OF ADOLESCENCE

  In 1959, renowned developmental psychologist Erik Erikson wrote, “The adolescent process . . . is conclusively complete only when the individual has subordinated his childhood identifications to a new kind of identification, achieved in absorbing sociability and in competitive apprenticeship with and among his age-mates.”8 To put this in contemporary vernacular, to grow into adults, teens need to socialize with their peers. This essential task of adolescence is called separation-individuation. As young teens begin to separate from their families of origin to construct their own unique identities, peer groups become very important. “The exploration of who they are in relation to their social environment is a way for youth to figure out where they fit in,” explains Dr. Pamela Rutledge.9

  Rutledge, whom you met in the book’s introduction, is a professor of media psychology at Fielding Graduate University. She is also the director of the Media Psychology Research Center and coauthor of Exploring Positive Psychology: The Science of Happiness and Well-Being and is sought out regularly by the media to comment on technology’s psychological impact. When it comes to how young people use social media, Rutledge is a firm believer that there are many positive benefits. “Social connections help teens develop emotionally and physically,” she says.

  “We are hardwired to be social animals,” explains Rutledge. “How we interact with others and our attention to how others see us . . . that’s a biological imperative. Young people have always focused on social activities that help them connect with the world outside their family of origin. Identity formation is a critical task of adolescence and young adulthood so that they have the psychological tools they need to leave the nest and successfully build a life of their own.”10

  While this much about adolescence has not changed, obviously the places where they do this socialization has. Digital media provides ample and easy opportunities for teens to satisfy their biological needs for socialization. It also provides a way for them to satisfy a trio of other psychological needs: social comparison, self-disclosure, and impression management. “While these terms probably strike fear into a parent’s heart, there are very positive aspects of each,” explains Rutledge. “Social comparison is how everyone observes and compares their behavior to others. It allows us to learn social norms and express affiliation. Self-disclosure is not always about oversharing; it’s actually at the heart of relational closeness. By sharing experiences with friends, we feel closer and more connected to others. And finally, impression management is a fancy term for the actions one takes to control one’s own image. This might mean highlighting positive traits, minimizing negative ones, or expressing connection with a group.”

  None of this was “invented by social media,” says Rutledge. “Whether it’s Facebo
ok, Snapchat, cruising Main Street, or hanging out at the malt shop, people are biologically compelled to explore their social worlds.”11

  While this information doesn’t make for captivating headlines, it does explain why it’s so darn hard for teens to disconnect from their phones and why—when used safely and in moderation—socializing online might not be such a terrible thing, after all.

  COULD SOCIAL MEDIA BE GOOD FOR YOUTH?

  Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, Xbox Live, WhatsApp, and so forth. Teen friendships thrive in these communities today. More than nine in ten teens spend time online with their real-life friends, and nearly one-third do so every single day. They are making new friends online, too. Nearly two-thirds report having forged at least one new friendship online.12 Moreover, 67 percent of teens report that they would feel isolated if they couldn’t talk to the their friends via technology.13

  Research on the impact of all this digital connection is beginning to validate what media psychologists like Rutledge have long suspected:

  •A large amount of time online is spent on strengthening existing bonds between friends.14

  •Social media can help teens understand their friends’ feelings.15

  •Social media contributes to less peer-related loneliness.16

  •Youth who struggle with their social lives offline can sometimes develop friendships and receive social support online that they are not receiving elsewhere.17

  •Emerging research is showing an association between social media, increased self-esteem, and the development of social capital (resources available through social connections).18