Helping kids gain from adversity: Inspiration for parents, teachers

I just listened to Aimee Mullins's just-posted TED Talk of last October and thought to myself anyone who loves teaching, young people, and the power of the human spirit would resonate with this. Aimee is an actor, athlete, and model (full bio here) who has not merely overcome and pushed through the adversity of being born without fibula, or shin bones, but used that adversity to find and bring out her in-born potential. She talks about not long ago bumping into the OB-GYN who delivered her in her home town in Pennsylvania and hearing about how, because of her career, he tells his medical students, "In my experience, unless repeatedly told otherwise and if given just a modicum of support, if left to their own devices, a child will achieve." She adds, "If we can change the current paradigm from one of achieving normalcy to achieving ability or potency, we can release the power of so many more children and invite them to engage their rare and valuable abilities with the community" – the abilities each child has. She later adds something I think my friend Lenore Skenazy over at FreeRangeKids.com, kindred spirit Tanya Byron in the UK, and a whole lot of other parents would appreciate: "Our responsibility is not simply shielding those we care for from adversity but preparing them to meet it well."

Mullins says something important about technology and social networking too (which I feel would resonate with the authors of Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out). After reading the dictionary definition of "disability" to the audience, she said: "Our language hasn't allowed us to get caught up with the changes in our society, many of which have been brought about by technology." She lists some examples, among them "social-networking platforms [which] allow people to self-identify, to claim their own description of themselves so they can go align with global groups of their own choosing." Think about this in light of bullying and cyberbullying, where kids identified by others as "handicapped" in any way are often the targets. Social media can help remove or at least delay the labels bullies exploit, giving children some much-needed space and peace for identity exploration. Mullins puts it so eloquently: "Maybe technology is revealing more clearly to us now what has always been a truth: that everyone has something rare and powerful to offer our society and that the human ability to adapt is our greatest asset." Don't miss the talk, including the lines Mullins quotes from a 14th Persian poet at the end.

Net-safety leadership: UK Council unveils strategy

Where dealing with children's online safety is concerned, the UK continues to impress. Clearly it was no easy task, but on the recommendation of psychologist, professor, TV personality, parent, and author of the Prime Minister Brown-appointed Byron Review Tanya Byron, the September 2008-launched UK Council for Child Internet Safety – made up of a staggering 140+ companies, organizations, and individuals – this week released its first safety strategy: "Click Clever Click Safe." A lot of the executive summary is music to my ears. Here's what I read:

Safety in context - safety's role not only in protecting but also enabling children's full, healthy participation in participatory society (I would only add: as active good citizens, not just digital ones, and stakeholders in their own well-being and that of their communities online and offline)

Safety takes a village (maybe even more than raising a child does), requiring the expertise of all stakeholders: chief among them youth, but also parents, educators, the Internet industry, mental-health and risk-prevention practitioners, law enforcement, policymakers, and clergy – many of these skill sets are represented on the Council. And hear, hear!: "By working together, learning from one another’s experience and reinforcing one another’s messages we can achieve more than the toughest legislation, the biggest company or the most caring charity ever could alone."

The child-protection village is global. Again, hear, hear!: The Strategy says, "We need to make links between international, national and local efforts to help children.... Work done here must be done with and alongside international efforts to improve child online safety."

Practical intelligence: How little have I seen this level of realism in our news media: "As in the offline world, we can never keep children completely safe, and this is not about imposing unnecessary restrictions that undermine the Internet’s benefits," the Strategy states. I would only add this bit of practical intelligence: that all forms of safety need to be addressed and, hopefully seen eventually to be children's rights and responsibilities online. The forms of safety are physical, psychological, legal, reputational, and personal (identity and property).

Clearly, we have kindred spirits across the Atlantic (see some similar thinking in ConnectSafely's"Online Safety 3.0: Empowering & Protecting Youth"). But what we all need to consider adding, now, to our work on both sides of the Pond, I feel, is a *layered* approach to online safety education, mapped to the need and the audience and based on the research showing that not all youth are equally at risk, and the young people most at risk online are those most at risk offline....

One thing I'd add: Levels of Net-safety ed needed

A logical way to organize Net-safety education is to map it to the levels of prevention which the risk-prevention community has adapted from disease prevention, I realized in talking with risk-prevention practitioner Patti Agatston of the Atlanta area's Cobb County School District. In a conversation started by Nancy Willard of the Center for Safe & Responsible Internet Use, it dawned on me that this tiered approach is exactly what online-safety ed needs as well – and I hope colleagues agree. The levels are simply:

Primary: Not "primary" as in school but as in universal – tangible prevention in the form of new-media literacy and citizenship (as mentioned above), taught pre-K-12, throughout the curriculum (based on research published in Archives of Pediatrics that youth who engage in aggressive behavior are more than twice as likely to be victimized, indicating that critical thinking and civility are preventive if not protective).

Secondary: More focused prevention education aimed at mitigating cyberbullying, sexting, cutting, anorexia, substance abuse, etc. represented or reinforced online as well as offline. This level of prevention can also be applied to specific events or incidents that need to be turned into "teachable moments" at school, either with a whole-school approach or in working with focused groups of students – e.g., a unit in health class about the psychological and legal implications of sexting.

Tertiary: Prevention AND intervention for the minority of youth who already have established patterns of risky behaviors disrupting their lives. At this level, the risk-prevention practitioners themselves need the training – in social media use – so they can fold this knowledge into their work with young people.

Key take-aways: School, industry, child services

As for the headlines in the UK, the most common was that, starting in September 2011, it'll be compulsory in British schools for kids aged 5+ to be taught Internet safety (see The Telegraph's). I hope the universal education piece will evolve quickly to new media literacy and citizenship (online and offline), which by definition include the critical thinking about potentially harmful incoming messages from mean peers, adult strangers, and all sorts of manipulators as well as harmful outgoing messages from young stakeholders in constructive community at school and home and online.

The strategy calls on the Internet industry to move beyond the self-regulation it had apparently hoped for. According to the Times Online, "child safety campaigners have been locked in months of tortuous negotiations with internet industry leaders over what companies could do to make children safer. The industry has agreed [to] a range of new requirements, such as offering parents more rigorous privacy settings which, for example, include a secret password," including "reluctant agreement ... to have progress on safety assessed independently by one of the big consultancy firms."

And for everybody who works with children, the 140-member Council pledges that: "In England and Wales by March 2010 we will include online safety in the ‘Common Core’ of skills and knowledge for people who work with children and work to make sure this is reflected in qualifications for people who work with children." The next step is to teach the same experts (mentioned in the Tertiary level above) how to function easily in the media environments youth love (texting, virtual worlds, online games, social network sites, etc.). A clinical psychologist I met in Mexico City couldn't get an extremely shy teenage boy to talk with him until he went to see the boy in World of Warcraft, where the latter felt comfortable to talk with him; then the boy was able to talk with the psychologist in his office. I heard a similar story from a Texas mother, who was able to keep in touch with her college-student son once they played World or Warcraft together on Sunday afternoons (he at his distant college and she at home).

Some key data in the report

The Strategy reported that...

99% of British 8-to-17-year-olds have access to the Net.

76% of young people say the Internet means their friends are there whenever they need them.

18% of children have come across harmful or inappropriate content online

50% of children encountering harmful or inappropriate content say they did something about it.

82% of children say their school has taught them how to use the internet safely.

67% of parents have rules for their children’s internet usage.

33% say their parents don’t really know what they do on the internet.

79% of UK parents say they talk to their children about online safety, but only 52% of children agree.

Related links

The indispensable multi-year, pan-European online-youth research at "EU Kids Online," based at the London School of Economics and funded by the EC's Safer Internet Programme

"From users to citizens: How to make digital citizenship relevant"

"Social norming & digital citizenship"

Proposed definition of digital literacy and citizenship"

"Europe's amazing Internet-safety work"

"Net safety: How social networks can be protective"

"Social media literacy: The new Internet safety"

Schools as 'prison houses': Misunderstanding media

I'm not sure what the game of "conkers" is like but, at the gut level, UK Independent Schools Association chair John Gibson certainly resonates, probably with most parents, when he says that playing outside "as a child and taking part in activities such as putting an oily chain back on a bike, or playing conkers, exposes children to emotions such as disappointment which prepare them for adulthood," as the BBC reports. He told the Association's annual conference that "many children are living in a 'prison-like environment' surrounded by technology," according to the BBC. Part of that makes some sense - and echoes UK clinical psychologist Tanya Byron's suggestion that "kids are being raised in captivity" (see this) - but what Gibson says about technology is way too simplistic, if not incorrectly dismissive. He said, "When your life is lived through images constructed by a technical genius from Silicon Valley played on a high definition screen I just feel it will be more difficult to experience those important rehearsals for adult life." Equating virtual worlds, et al as images on a HD screen reflects a basic misunderstanding of social media as mere technology, an add-on to "real life," while social media are people's real-life producing and socializing 1) appearing on a screen and 2) extended onto the Web - not much like TV! The very "prison houses" of school and home Gibson refers to (and made so because of the fearful adult society Byron refers to) are what have made social media so compelling to youth!

Gibson told his audience, heads of independent schools in England and Wales, that they should offer children a diversity and excellence of experience to challenge the culture of technology in which they live outside school. Absolutely. But maybe word it a bit differently: to enrich, rather than "challenge," the cultures and interest groups they're participating in with the help of technology. Seems to me that, if schools could use social technologies to help teach social media literacy and citizenship, they will contribute to and enrich children's positive participation in participatory culture and society (moving full-steam ahead right now, largely without our education system). Just as school has helped make the use of books and other conventional media meaningful for youth for centuries, it can do so now with new media. [Meanwhile, the debate about whether the evolving Internet is hurting our children continues - see "Social networking infantilizing kids' brains?"]

'Kids being raised in captivity': UK's Byron

This may sound about right on this side of the Atlantic too: UK clinical psychologist Tanya Byron - prime minister-appointed author of the 2008 Byron Review of child safety on the Web and in videogames - told an audience that their risk-averse society was keeping children cooped up at home on a "global playground" called the Internet, where they can be at greater risk than if allowed out more, The Telegraph reports. Speaking at the annual gathering of Britain's Teenage Magazine Arbitration Panel, "the industry body that regulates sexual content in publications for young people," Byron suggested that adults need not only to understand the potential risks but the nature of the playground itself, how - if parts of it have curfews or are deemed off-limits to youth - they can simply move on to more risky areas. "Professor Byron said that many adults had responded to her review by suggesting that the Internet should be shut down completely, or that a 'watershed' must be imposed so that children cannot access it after 9pm - showing their failure to understand it.... Instead, she said parents and teachers ... should learn more about what young people are doing online." [For related links, here's video of her speaking - as a parent, psychologist, and researcher - at the Oxford Internet Institute, "Beyond Byron: Towards a New Culture of Responsibility" (I found it fascinating to hear her talk about her Byron Review development process, working through all the various perspectives); coverage in The Guardian of another talk, at a conference held by UK regulator Ofcom, where Byron cautioned against overregulating the Internet; and the Byron Review's own Web site and my coverage upon its release.]