• 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

Peering thoughtfully through this window into our kids’ lives

August 15, 2012 By Anne 4 Comments

Back in 2005, a friend in Massachusetts referred to his daughters’ constant instant messaging (remember that?!) as “a window into their lives that I wouldn’t have otherwise. [My daughter] leaves her computer on a table beside my desk, and I get to watch a bunch of this stuff happening. Sort of like me working while she and a friend talk right inside her open bedroom door while I am working on the other side – we shouldn’t be amazed that they zone us out when we are trying to talk to them – they zone us out all the time!”

Now the 2012-style “window”: Somini Sengupta recently wrote in the New York Times about a mother in Colorado who discovered her 16-year-old had set up her own YouTube channel and broadcasting “mundane teenage banter … for the world to see.” The mom sees it, Sengupta writes, as “a window into her daughter’s mind and an emblem of the strange new hurdles of modern-day parenting. She did not mention it to her daughter; she just subscribed to the channel’s updates. The daughter said nothing either; she just let Mom keep watching.” Like the 11-year-old in Massachusetts.

These anecdotes bear out what a Canadian study found, that kids are getting used to being monitored online, that they see it almost as the price of admission to digital media use (see “Surveillance nation” in this post). Which suggests to me this unprecedented access we parents can now have to their social interaction and even innermost thoughts is something we should handle very thoughtfully, knowing that we can’t always understand the context of their comments, likes, and vlog musings. A grandmother in Virginia told Sengupta that it’s hard to see things in social sites like a grandchild “having trouble with a boy” and not saying anything, but she “knows to keep her mouth shut.”

I love what author and researcher Lynn Schofield Clark told Sengupta about how getting too involved in monitoring our kids online can “undermine our influence as parents.” She said our kids “interpret that as a lack of trust,” and how we don’t want that at a time in their lives when we do want them to come to us when stuff comes up! Handling this unprecedented access with care increases trust – and therefore safety, in many forms, especially the emotional kind.

Share Button

Filed Under: Filtering, monitoring, etc., Literacy & Citizenship, Parenting, Privacy, Risk & Safety Tagged With: Internet safety, Lynn Schofield Clark, monitoring, Parenting, Social Media, Trust

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Jacqueline Vickery says

    August 17, 2012 at 6:20 pm

    Hi Anne,

    The link to the Canadian study about Surveillance in this post does not seem to be working. Would you mind sharing it again? I’d be interested in reading more about the study.

    Thanks!

    Reply
    • Anne says

      August 24, 2012 at 5:26 pm

      Jacqueline, sorry about that bad link. It’s because my blog hosting service had a server glitch that somehow several months’ worth of my post. They say they’re working to restore. End of rant.

      Here‘s that post in ConnectSafely.org, linking to the Canadian study. And Part 2 of that post. Thanks for asking.

      Reply

Trackbacks

  1. TMI: Parents and Social Media says:
    May 21, 2013 at 3:31 pm

    […] “Peering thoughtfully through this window into our kids’ lives” […]

    Reply
  2. Private vs. public parenting (& a Pew study) | NetFamilyNews.org says:
    November 28, 2012 at 4:21 am

    […] “Peering thoughtfully into this window into our kids lives” […]

    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.