Becoming a Digital Parent

A Practical Guide to Help Families Navigate Technology

Carrie Rogers Whitehead

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367424640
• eBook ISBN: 9781000299953
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Medios digitales

Becoming a Digital Parent is a practical, readable guide that will help all parents have confidence to successfully navigate technology with their children. It accessibly presents evidence-based guidance to offer an overview of the digital landscape, empowering parents to embrace opportunities whilst keeping children responsible and safe online.

Covering a range of topics including developmental stages, screen time, bed time, gaming, digital identities, and helpful parenting apps and resources, Carrie Rogers-Whitehead explores the challenges and opportunities involved in parenting in the digital age. With advice for parents of babies through to teenagers, each chapter includes an explanation of the latest research, interviews with parents and experts, and helpful case studies gathered by the author during her extensive experience of working directly with parents and children. This book will show parents how to communicate better with their children, create a family technology plan, put in place intervention strategies when things happen, and take advantage of the benefits technology can afford us.

Becoming a Digital Parent is ideal for all parents looking to effectively navigate the technological world, and the range of professionals who work with them.

Chapter 1
Parenting Is Not What It Used to Be

Technology Trends

When I was in junior high, I was convinced that the Internet was never going to take off. This was actually something I said to my friend, as we sat in the computer room doing homework. We were researching for a group project in history and had tried in vain to look things up online.

The big, boxy computer took about fifteen minutes to boot up. We had to wait while it made alien beeps and screeches, hoping we wouldn’t get some weird black or blue screen and it actually came on. If we were lucky, the big grey behemoth would bring us to a desktop with Netscape, and my favorite pastime while waiting for things to load: Minesweeper.

At this point, I needed to alert everyone else in the house that we were going online. I would clomp down the stairs and yell, “Mom, don’t get on the phone. I’m getting on the computer.” Then, I would clomp back up and cross my fingers she heard me, nothing came up for which she needed to use the phone, or no one called the house. I would also hold my breath that my little sister would not come into the room wanting to get on the computer, because there was only one in the whole house and it was dedicated to homework. Getting online was a fraught process.

If I were lucky enough and everything worked out, I would click on Netscape, but very carefully. I knew if I clicked too much, it would throw off the computer. It would think I wanted multiple screens, and then I might have to restart the computer and start all over. Back then, I was also very careful on whatever I clicked on, because an innocent click on an article or picture would be a five-minute detour while the screen loaded. I was extremely deliberate. Browsing wasn’t really a thing in junior high. I had to log on, do what I needed to do, and then log off.

That afternoon with my friend, we had finally given up on the computer and loaded up a CD-ROM, Encarta, which was much more reliable than this Internet thing everyone kept talking about. After poor loading speeds, bad links, and holding our breath that everything would align, and we could actually get online, we gave up. Exasperated, I said, “I don’t know why anyone would want to use the Internet.”

That is the Internet parents of Gen Zs and Alphas are familiar with. The painstakingly slow, dial-up kind. While I had Internet through junior high and high school, it was not a big part of my life. When I was older, I would chat on it and sometimes play games, but it was a tool, like a dishwasher.

I got a phone my junior year, a gray and black Nokia. But like the Internet, it was functional. It would sit in my purse or car most of the time and only come up when I was working late, or plans changed. Texting was still very expensive and very few people did it. Besides making calls, the only other thing I would do on that Nokia was play Snake.

The technology of older Millennials and Gen X may as well be from a different planet as far as Gen Z is concerned. The concept of loading in a disc, not texting, only having one computer, and slow loading speeds is something that they have never experienced. If the Internet stayed at that mid-1990s level, my tween self would be right. Why would anyone use an Internet like that? But that is no longer the case. And my childhood experiences with technology are radically different than what my child will experience.

Technology is not the same; it’s radically different. However, we create policies, rules, and norms in our homes, schools, and organizations as if it were the same. We are often in the computer room mindset, that if we just limit devices at home, then any issues are taken care of. But there are no computer rooms with one shared bulky device anymore. In some cases, the whole house is a computer. The Internet is not confined to one device or place. It’s everywhere. But with filters, restrictions, blocks, and rules, we act as if it were. This chapter will cover tech trends into the near future. If we want to parent effectively, we need to understand this new reality. Things are not the same, and they won’t be again.

Brief History of Technology Since the 1970s

Microprocessors, Atari, Nintendo, fiber optics, VHS, Walkmans, and much more came out in the 1970s and 1980s. These decades, particularly the 1970s, contributed to the exponential growth of computing and modern technology. Still, much of this tech was more a novelty than a commodity. Most video gaming still took place in an arcade, video rentals in a store, and computing in certain fields of work. While children of the 1970s and 1980s, Generation X and some Millennials, had interactions with technology, it was not a constant in their lives. A big reason it was not integrated in every aspect of life is that there was no Internet. The Internet is the glue that connected music, gaming, entertainment, and computing all together, for good or ill.

In 1995, Robert Metcalf, the individual credited with inventing Ethernet, made a notorious prediction. “Almost all of the many predictions now being made about 1996 hinge on the Internet’s continuing exponential growth. But I predict the Internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse” (Townsend, 2016). You may chuckle now at that statement, which Metcalf has gone on record to deeply regret, but many people, my tween self included, believed it. The Internet was slow and not very searchable. Computer Associates founder Charles Wang was deeply skeptical. He told the New York Times, “Put newspapers and magazines out of business? It will never happen. … People say the Internet will replace stores. It will never happen” (Townsend, 2016). But it did happen, and it happened quickly.

From its time as ARPANET in the 1960s and 1970s, used by governments and researchers, the Internet started commercialization in the early 1980s. It was not officially called the Internet until 1995 when the Federal Networking Council adopted that term. In 1990, there was the World Wide Web, introduced by Tim Berners-Lee. While the World Wide Web and Internet are used interchangeably, the Web is a service that travels over the Internet through hypertext.

Higher-speed access was not available to the public until 1996, but even then, it was very limited. It wasn’t until the late 1990s and early 2000s that broadband instead of dial-up became the means of Internet access. Broadband access has increased exponentially. As of 2017, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) reported 92.3% of Americans have broadband access at home (FCC, 2019). The Internet that young people are familiar with is only about ten to fifteen years old. Broadband access and the growth of the Internet led to the next revolution and evolution of tech: mobile.

Smartphones

Almost all teens have a smartphone. A 2018 Pew Research study reports that 95% of teens can access one (Anderson and Jiang, 2018). Consider how quickly this has happened. IBM technically made a smartphone in the mid-Nineties, but it was bulky and only used in very limited fashion before being put aside. The infrastructure wasn’t there to support it. While the Internet was available, it wasn’t until the mid 2000s that 3G technology had improved to the point to make it worthwhile to connect through mobile. While Apple may want to claim all the credit for the innovation of the iPhone, the path was laid out a decade in advance. This allowed Steve Jobs to stride across the Macworld stage in his famous black turtleneck on January 9, 2007, and introduce the iPhone. In just eleven years, a novelty item had become part of almost every adolescent’s life.

Figure 1.1 Smartphone with apps

A big innovation Apple can claim most of the credit for is popularizing apps. An app is a software application. The Snake game I played as a teen on my Nokia phone was one of the first apps. At first, Steve Jobs only wanted Apple to develop apps, not any third parties. Due to convincing by the Apple staff, Jobs eventually changed his mind and allowed others to create apps for the iPhone, but not without giving Apple a 30% cut. This encouraged the app revolution to happen. Small companies, as well as large, could have access to millions of eyes on smartphones.

Apps are what make a smartphone a smartphone. They also contribute to an increasing amount of screen time. Statistica estimates the total app downloads will leap to 352 billion in 2021. That’s up from about 200 billion in 2017, which already was a jump from 2016 when there were about 149 billion app downloads (Clement, 2020). These numbers far exceed the number of people on the planet. If every person on the planet had a smartphone, they would need to download at least three apps to reach those 2017 numbers.

Whose eyes are on these apps? Unsurprisingly, it’s Generation Z. A company that measures cross-platform tech statistics, Comscore, reports that the ages 18–24 report the most time on these apps, close to 100 hours each month. These are your children, students in classrooms now, and those who in a decade or less will come to dominate the workforce.

Entertainment Trends and Technology

TV Trends

Other revolutions happened in entertainment. A child of the 1970s through the 1990s probably remembers watching the clock closely for when their favorite television show started. You may have set the timer on your VCR to record or read the TV Guide or local newspaper on the day’s programming.

I remember in elementary school, my neighbor friends and I counted down the hours until Saturday night. That’s when SNICK happened. SNICK stood for Saturday Night Nickelodeon. It had such amazing shows as Are You Afraid of the Dark?, The Ren and Stimpy Show, and The Secret World of Alex Mack. We would gather our popcorn, blankets, and soda and hurry to get settled before the first show started. When commercials came on, there would be a mad dash to the bathroom or to the kitchen. There weren’t any pause buttons back then. You could not wait until later to watch your favorite show. You scheduled your day around it, and if you missed it, you’d be that kid at school the next day who didn’t know what everyone else was talking about.

TV now, like the Internet, is ubiquitous and constant. If you’re feeling as if there’s too much TV—you’re right. The number of new original series that debuted in 2018 was the highest on record. There were 495 scripted original series on TV, which includes basic and paid cable, online services, and broadcast TV. This is an 85% increase from 2011. And before the 2010s there were even fewer shows, only 182 in 2002 (Hibberd, 2018).

As broadband speeds increased, streaming services became possible. The most well-known is Netflix, which was founded in 1997. It originally only sold or rented DVDs. It wasn’t until 2007, the same year that the iPhone debuted, that it started streaming media. In 2012, Netflix started creating original content, which bumped up that increase of new content even more. Netflix is not the only subscription service. Amazon Prime Video is close behind in popularity. It carved a similar path as Netflix, launching in 2006 primarily with video, but then adding their own original content in 2013.

Streaming is another new normal for Generation Z and younger. The concept of waiting for a show and scheduling your day around it is gone. The phenomenon of a record number of people watching a show at once is gone. TV is more diverse and fragmented than ever before. Scripted TV used to reach large segments of people, like the very famous last episode of M*A*S*H in 1983, which had almost 106 million viewers. Almost all programming that has received those numbers since the 2010s has been sporting events.

The growth of new TV content has allowed new voices, perspectives, and cultures to get screen time they may have not had before. On the other hand, having so many different types of programming provides less common ground. The choice of content can provide new perspectives or allow someone to wall himself off. The magnitude of choices can also create fatigue and anxiety. The long list of shows on people’s watch lists, or never feeling as though they can keep up, can make TV feel more like a chore than entertainment.

Music Trends

When I was in high school, Napster was in its heyday. Napster highlighted the Wild West of the early Internet. In the late 1990s, two teens developed the technology—allowing Internet users to go into each other’s hard drives and share their MP3 music files. The MP3 was a relatively new invention, coming out just a few years prior. The tech behind this file format allowed a huge reduction in file sizes, which was vital during the mid and late 1990s when dial-up was the standard for connecting online.

I remember booting up my old Sony laptop and opening up Napster to the world’s music collection. I spent more time browsing what was available than actually downloading; it was still a hefty time commitment to download and then burn a CD. But during that browsing I found artists and music I would never have discovered without the short-lived file-sharing service.

Before Napster, buying music was more complicated. And while I was choosy with what files I would download, I was much choosier when deciding where to spend my hard-earned high school job cash. Like walking into a brightly-lit Blockbuster, going into Sam Goody with its wall-to-wall selection of CDs could be overwhelming. There were so many choices, but only so much cash.

Napster didn’t just give young adults music, it revolutionized the Internet. From Downloaded, the documentary of Napster which came out in 2013, director Alex Winter talked about that time. “There was no ramp up. There was no transition. … Napster was a ridiculous leap forward” (Lamont, 2013). That leap fo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Parenting Is Not What It Used to Be: Technology Trends
• 2 Prevention Science and Technology
• 3 Generation Alpha: Parenting Around Tech in Young Children
• 4 The Tween Years: Puberty + Peers + Tech
• 5 Digital Identities: Teens and Technology
• 6 Screen Time: The Real Facts and Research
• 7 Gaming: A Potential Pitfall or Positive
• 8 Resources and Apps: What to Use at Different Developmental Stages
• Appendix: Conversation Starters and Questions to Ask a Child About Technology
• Resources
• Index