• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

NetFamilyNews.org

Kid tech intel for everybody

Show Search
Hide Search
  • Home
  • Youth
  • Parenting
  • Literacy
  • Safety
  • Policy
  • Research
  • About NetFamilyNews.org
    • Supporters
    • Anne Collier’s Bio
    • Copyright
    • Privacy

Parenting or (digital) public humiliation?

December 4, 2012 By Anne 2 Comments

After I wrote “The trust factor in parenting online kids,” I read an insightful commentary by parent, author, and professor Lynn Schofield Clark in Psychology Today – “Disciplining Teens for Online Mistakes” – which touches on monitoring as well as the issue of parenting in public that I wrote about recently too. We definitely resonate, but Lynn is a scholar, writing a neutral piece that describes what I’d call the extreme ends of the digital parenting spectrum. You could call them:

  • Covert helicopter parenting (secretive, preventive) – “parents see their children as capable of being strong and self-sufficient, but they also see them as vulnerable” and therefore in need of monitoring and always-available parents (discussed in my previous post).
  • Public humiliation, digital-style (overt, punitive) – a sort of “tough love” approach, where parents “assert their authority and demand respect” using their children’s social networking accounts to get it; they see their children as strong enough to deal with the public punishment the “parents believe they earned.”

“Both approaches can have consequences,” Lynn writes. In the case of digital helicopter parenting, parents can “end up feeling disrespected as their children manipulate the situation to suit themselves.” In the case of punitive public parenting, “children might end up feeling disrespected by the parents’ responses.” An understatement, I’d say. The professor leads her post with some very disturbing examples of the latter, one being the digital version of hanging a super-embarrassing sign around the neck of your newly social 13-year-old and making her stand in a public place where her friends hang out.

Better to use social media for relationship strengthening and healing than relational harm. I love what Lynn writes about that: “What’s interesting about the new media context, however, is that it opens the possibility for greater mutuality in our relationships with one another, because it allows us to have more information about one another and to express more ongoing concern for one another than ever before. We can get glimpses into the worlds of those we care about and can … come to gain an appreciation for that person’s frame of reference.”

She adds that “it’s not easy or automatic to see the world through someone else’s eyes” and cites the view of Dr. Linda Hartling (director of the Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies Network) as saying that, “when both people feel seen, known, heard, and respected in a relationship, they begin to generate mutual empowerment” and mutual empathy (see this interview with Hartling on YouTube). Practicing that with our children in social media and everyday life goes far in teaching the social literacy that enables a lifetime of social, academic, and professional success. [Please also click to Lynn’s post for a closing statement to which I wholeheartedly subscribe.]

This is Part 2 of this two-parter on digital parenting. Here’s Part 1.

Share Button

Filed Under: Parenting Tagged With: dignity, Linda Hartling, Lynn Schofield Clark, Parenting, parenting styles, public humiliation, tech parenting

Reader Interactions

Trackbacks

  1. Great Digital Parenting Blog Posts at New Family News « Media! Tech! Parenting! says:
    January 14, 2013 at 7:48 pm

    […] Anne Collier’s two Net Family News posts, The Trust Factor in Parenting Online Kids and Parenting or (Digital) Public Humiliation, I leaned back to process all of the content in these two short articles. “Well done!” […]

    Reply
  2. Parenting or (digital) public humiliation? says:
    December 4, 2012 at 8:46 am

    […] online kids,” I read an insightful commentary by parent, author, and professor Source: Net Family News Bookmark the […]

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Primary Sidebar

NFN in your in-box:

Anne Collier


Bio and my...
2016 TEDx Talk on
the heart of digital citizenship

Subscribe to my
RSS feed
Follow me on Twitter or even better:
NEW: Follow me on MASTODON!
Friend me on Facebook
See me on YouTube

IMPORTANT RESOURCES

Our (DIGITAL) PARENTING BASICS: Safety + Social
NAMLE, the National Association for Media Literacy Education
CASEL.org & the 5 core social-emotional competencies of SEL
Center for Democracy & Technology
Center for Innovative Public Health Research
Childnet International
Committee for Children
Congressional Internet Caucus Academy
ConnectSafely.org
Control Shift: a pivotal book for Internet safety
Crimes Against Children Research Center
Crisis Textline
Cyber Civil Rights Initiative's Revenge Porn Crisis Line
Cyberwise.org
danah boyd's blog and book about networked youth
Disconnected, Carrie James's book on digital ethics
FOSI.org's Good Digital Parenting
The research of Global Kids Online
The Good Project at Harvard's School of Education
If you watch nothing else: "Parenting in a Digital Age" TED Talk by Prof. Sonia Livingstone
The International Bullying Prevention Association
Let Grow Foundation
Making Caring Common
Raising Digital Natives, author Devorah Heitner's site
Renee Hobbs at the Media Education Lab
MediaSmarts.ca
The New Media Literacies
Report of the Aspen Task Force on Learning & the Internet and our guide to Creating Trusted Learning Environments
The Ruler Approach to social-emotional learning (Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence)
Sources of Strength
"Young & Online: Perspectives on life in a digital age" from young people in 26 countries (via UNICEF)
"Youth Safety on a Living Internet": 2010 report of the Online Safety & Technology Working Group (and my post about it)

Categories

Recent Posts

  • A solution for ‘awful but lawful’
  • New global service for getting nudes off the Internet
  • Then there’s the flip side of ChatGPT
  • For SID 2023: What youth want ‘online safety’ to teach
  • ChatGPT for media literacy training
  • Future safety: Content moderators and digital grassroots justice
  • Mental health 2023, Part 1: Youth on algorithms
  • Where did my Twitter go? And other end-of-2022 notes

Footer

Welcome to NetFamilyNews!

Founded as a nonprofit public service in 1999, NetFamilyNews quickly became the “community newspaper” of a vital interest community of subscribers in more than 50 countries. Site and newsletter became a blog in the early 2000s. Nowadays, you can subscribe in the box to the right to receive articles in your in-box as they're posted – or look for tweets, posts on our Facebook page, and key commentaries from Anne on her page at Medium.com. She welcomes your comments, follows and shares!

Categories

  • Home
  • Youth
  • Parenting
  • Literacy
  • Safety
  • Policy
  • Research

ABOUT

  • About NFN
  • Supporters
  • Anne Collier’s Bio
  • Copyright
  • Privacy

Search

Subscribe



THANKS TO NETFAMILYNEWS.ORG's SUPPORTER HOMESCHOOL CURRICULUM.
Copyright © 2023 ANNE COLLIER. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.