While there hasn’t been a major study published yet on how much time students have spent online during the Covid-19 pandemic, every indication suggests that the answer is “more.” In this era of social distancing, stay-at-home orders, online schooling and the return to in-person classes, research is more important than ever—it can help teach us how to parent well in a digital era.
For the past 15 years or so, as classroom teachers in the fields of law and history, teaching students at the high school, college and graduate levels,the ways in which young people use technology has been researched.The answer these days, for most families, can’t be “don’t ever use screens.” So, it is more a matter of what you can do to make all that screen time more productive and to improve overall health, learning and well-being. Here are ten parenting ideas based on what the research tells us.
Screen time is much more about quality than it is about quantity. As our kids are Zooming and Snapchatting and Tik Toking their way through a pandemic-scarred school year, the idea that we would set sharp limits on the amount of time they are looking at devices seems a little hard to imagine too. (And are you really putting down your phone yourself? More on that in a moment.)
The research tells us that the time kids spend on devices is less important than what they do when they are connected. Of course, it is important to note that the rules for screen time in a home should vary by age. We share the view of the American Academy of Pediatrics, for instance, that very young children—say, under the age of 2—have no good reason to be exposed to screens and that there are downsides of doing so. The AAP and other researchers have found lasting negative effects of too much screen time at an early age on children’s language development, reading ability and short-term memory. The one exception we make for these little ones is for connecting with doting grandparents or other relatives on FaceTime or Zoom. On the other end of the spectrum, it’s clear that you can’t have effective screen time limits for most older teens; both research and experience shoes that they will ignore you and will simply work around your efforts to control them, undermining their trust in you and the strength of your relationship in the process.
Take data privacy seriously yourself and translate that experience into talks with your kids.
Take data privacy more seriously than you do right now. And then talk about it with your kids, ideally by the time they have reached the tween years. That’s the point at which they have likely begun to engage regularly with social media, whether on a mobile phone you’ve given them or on another device inside or outside the home. Research show that many regular practices can help young people develop good data privacy habits. While an increasing number of states require some form of digital literacy classes, most parents can’t rely on schools to teach the data skills and habits that young people need.
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