That would be fine, if teenagers were reasonable or didn’t have a capacity for negotiation that made FARC look reasonable. She also has suggestions about how much parents should check their kids phones (with permission, alas), starting at about once a day when they first get them, every now and then through middle school and working up to almost never, unless you suspect something life-threatening, as they reach the upper limits of high school. Heitner suggests asking about their hopes and aims, then figuring out what they need to do to achieve them and working back on how much screen time/sleep they expect they will need from there. This means getting off your phone, trying to balance your work and life and what she calls “cocreating conversations” with teenagers about appropriate limits. “I prefer to mentor rather than monitor,” says Heitner. Heitner has come across parents who use geolocating apps to check if their kids are going to class at college. Moreover, she points out, there’s no app that can teach delayed gratification or discipline, the twin peaks of self control that every teenager must climb if they are to pass into adulthood. “How bad do they have to mess up before you step in?” asks Heitner. “You’re going to be reading a lot of boring stuff.”Īnd when parents do see something that alarms them on one of their espionage missions, do they react and blow up the trust in the relationship or do they have to sit back and fret until the kid comes to them for help? “Most kids are not involved in a sexting ring,” says Heitner. Installing an app on an offspring’s phone without their permission, or covertly spying on their texts or social media conversations, means that parents lose an opportunity to talk about what’s going on. (Yes!) “But there’s no app that has the discernment that you do.” (Nooooo!) “An app feels like a handy solution,” she says. I turn to Devorah Heitner, author of the new book Screenwise: Helping Kids Thrive and Survive in Their Digital World. We made our kids sign a contract when we got them their phones, with all sorts of common sense stipulations about times of use and what may or may not be forwarded. My kid wouldn’t know what hit her until (fiendish laugh) her phone suddenly ceased to work. I am a few minutes-and probably some technical complications-away from slaying the beast. (Screen replacement third one in 12 months.) I can install any app on it I like, even one with as uncool a name as TeenSafe. Boom.īut how to get the kids to agree to such an imposition? How to persuade the canary to enter the cage?Īnd then, the impossible happens. Press a button on your phone and their phone is off. No more cranky agitation over plugging the phone in away from their bedrooms at night. No more wheedling them to put the phone down and come to dinner. No more exhausting circular discussions about how homework takes so much longer if you keep getting distracted by new Instagram comments. Or I could shut off the data, but then the kids still have access to the big distracting world out there via the pesky wifi.Īfter hearing about TeenSafe, I begin to dream about my children’s phones the way I imagine Donald Trump dreams about Florida if I could just hold sway over it for a little while, my life would be so much easier. Of course I could always just take the phones away, but then I can’t reach them ever.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |