I’ve had a successful private psychology practice for almost twenty years. Half of my clients are adults and half children and teens. It is not uncommon on the first visit to encounter a motivated parent and a resistant teen. And by “resistant” I mean sullen, unfriendly, and sometimes outright hostile.
My first goal is to ensure that both parents and teens open up and engage with the therapeutic process. Imagine how difficult this is. Each party in the room has different and often opposing agendas. But essentially each wants me to tell the other how wrong they are while assuring them they are right. It’s impossible really.
The teens assume that they are at a serious disadvantage. After all, I’m old and a mother myself. How can I possibly relate to the plight of teens? And consider that they have already accrued some painful experiences with adults in the community who often treat teens unfairly with self-righteous contempt about the “entitlement of kids these days.”
Please join me in a virtual representation of a typical psychotherapy session in my office. Of course this representation is not of an actual client due to confidentiality concerns. Janie is fictional. She is a mosaic of many clients I have seen over the years.
Janie is a 14 year-old girl who was referred for treatment by her pediatrician after her parents checked her texts and discovered that she had a new best friend. The friend is a same-aged girl who lives in another state. The friendship consists of hundreds of texts, images, and videos shared every day for the last two months. Sally, the new bestie, seems like a nice enough girl, except she struggles with some painful psychological issues including anorexia, depression, anxiety, and cutting.
Janie is a compassionate caretaker for Sally and has shared her own secrets over the two-month-long friendship. Janie’s secrets include how angry she is with her stupid parents, how she got drunk last Friday night, how much she wants to lose her virginity . . . and . . . and . . . and . . .
Janie’s parents are devastated. They’d noticed she had become sullen, lost weight, and was being uncharacteristically cruel to them and her little brother over the last month. As a result, they decided to check her texts for the first time, elaborating that they had never had reason to be concerned before. In desperation, they yanked all screen media from Janie immediately and demanded that Janie never speak to Sally again.
Now, they sit across from me pleading with me to tell them what to do.
Parent demand for directive advice often puts me in a rough spot. Unlike popular public perception (thanks Dr. Phil), good psychotherapy is less about advice and more about facilitation and empowerment. Furthermore, when a family presents with an issue like this, there are five potential clients in the room: the daughter, the mother, the father, the marriage, and the family. Everybody needs something from the session, and desperately.
Not only do they all need reassurance and understanding, but they also need strategies, tried and true research-based strategies that are sensible and immediately actionable. They also need hope and healing from shame and guilt.
Prior to creating GetKidsInternetSafe(GKIS), I sometimes found myself blinking at distraught families asking for screen media advice like a well-intentioned, but dense jersey cow. I mean I was fully loaded to help with the relationships, but screen media rules? Yikes!
Ultimately, epidemic screen media issues in my practice and the need for support with my own kids propelled me to launch GetKidsInternetSafe. I worked for a year and a half to develop a state-of-the-art screen media toolkit; a toolkit that my families sorely needed, just like yours might, if not today then definitely tomorrow.
You might still be dying to know, what is the one thing that will destroy your parent-child relationship? One of the most common mistakes parents are making today with their kids is allowing screen media without putting a screen media living agreement in place.
What is a screen media living agreement? It is a written contract that comprehensively addresses any issues that may arise as the result of screen media, including family values, netiquette, rules, and regulations. And it’s a living agreement, because it is designed to be renegotiated and altered over time as issues come up and kids get older.
But how is this possible to develop a contract early enough, since even infants are allowed screen media? Educating yourself BEFORE your children use their first screen is essential. Recognize the risks and benefits of screen media and lay out a plan that allows enrichment but minimizes danger. GetKidsInternetSafe provides lots of free material to get you started, but parents must initiate the process.
What if you blew it and your kids have already been using screen media for awhile, like Janie’s family? Here’s the quick version of the plan I offered for Janie’s family.
In order to untangle screen media risk, a family like Janie’s must cleanse the screen media environment and start over. Lucky for me, most families already come in having already stripped screen media from their teens because if they haven’t, then it’s my job to suggest it. I have to justify it to the teens and quick, or I’ll lose their “like” forever.
From there, I lead the family through a psychoeducation process about how to:
reconnect as a family,
setup appropriate tech for cybersecurity, filtering, and monitoring,
make a workable and comprehensive GKIS Living Agreement,
implement sound parenting strategies for maintenance, and
slowly re-introduce screen media privileges while isolating and containing risk factors, monitoring and filtering as appropriate for the child’s age and the family’s beliefs.
You’d think the teens would despise me for suggesting this lockdown of their screen media, right? To the contrary, I am frequently shocked and impressed with the teenagers’ abilities to accept reasonable limits and embrace a more honest, up-front screen media plan. No more fearing parental spying and ambush, no more guessing at rules, and no more disappointing the people they love the most. Teens typically love the cooperative negotiation process and the opportunity to use their screen media without constant threats and withdrawal of privileges. I am not exaggerating when I say it delights me to see families transform from utter estrangement and desperation to cooperation, kindness, and compassion.
Just as parents must recognize that teens need their privacy, teens must recognize that screen media is not the appropriate medium for private content. There are countless interception and reproduction points in screen media communication. The illusion of screen media privacy is a trap.
Teens have to learn (hopefully the easy way) that it’s a trap, because one is lured into thinking that the conversations they are having will stay private. It’s a trap because it’s so easy to carry your friend with you 24/7, constantly sharing every activity, feeling, and venti frappuccino. It’s a trap because constant contact leads to dependent, intimate friendships. It’s a trap because, once shared, you lose control over that content, not only in regard to who sees it but also how it may be shared. A text, post, or image now becomes a physical entity that represents who you are – the good, the bad, and the ugly; an entity that can be edited and reshared with unknown numbers of people without consent.
If you’re a parent or know one, please avoid family crisis by taking an hour and sketching out a screen media living agreement for your family. GetKidsInternetSafe is here to help. And heads up, I’ve seen these screen media traps snare even young children and their parents. Don’t wait.
I’m the mom psychologist who will help you GetKidsInternetSafe.
I’m a psychologist married to a psychiatrist. Yes, I know how many of us it takes to screw in a light bulb . . . Between us, we treat people ages 2 to 92 and attempt to raise three of our own offspring. Ask us what we worry the most about with our clients (and offspring), and we’ll say sleep deprivation. Hands down, sleep deprivation is the most common and insidious threat to mental health in our practices.
With teens, we call staying up all night vamping, like a vampire but on screen media. And kids who stay up all night tend to sleep all day. Anybody who’s parented a teen during the summer knows this is a common state of being when a teen is left to their own devices. Then, when it’s time for school or other daytime activities it can be very difficult to reset a more reasonable sleep-wake schedule. I often see teens fall into anxious avoidance and depression as they try to make the switch.
Tips for How to Avoid the Slippery Slope of Vamping
NO SCREENS IN THE BEDROOM
Screens wake up our brains! Screen media stimulates the photosensors in the retina that signal the brain to suppress melatonin production (our sleep-regulating hormone). Less melatonin disrupts our natural circadian rhythms.
Screens in the bedroom also train us to be awake in bed. If we are often awake in bed, our bodies will automatically believe that the bed is an awake-only zone. If we only rest and sleep in bed, our bodies will be cued that the bed is a sleep-only zone. Although it is a challenge to stop teens from living their full life cycle on their beds, this habit can create sleep problems with the principles of conditioned behavioral response (awake paired with bed and screen time is a hard conditioning to overcome).
Make the No Screens in the Bedroom Rule BEFORE it’s necessary. I know it’s asking a lot to say no TV, video games, tablets, or smartphones in the bedroom. But, believe me, intimate spaces eventually lead to intimate gestures like sexting and the viewing of inappropriate online content. Too late for you because you’ve already allowed it? Stage a discussion and go slow. Yanking their freedom abruptly may trigger a backlash that may damage your hard-earned parent-child connection. The best-case scenario is starting with this rule from the very beginning.
SCREENS OFF 30 MINUTES BEFORE LIGHTS OUT
Psychologists have discovered that one of the most disabling features of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), an impairing anxiety disorder that results from trauma, is sleep deprivation that results from nightmares. While sleeping, the brain tends to prioritize and loop on frightening memories as it sorts through its memory cache for sorting and storage. As it loops, frightening content will appear in our dreams.
Just like the response to fright when we’re awake, stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline dump into our bloodstream when we have nightmares. If we are troubled upon falling asleep, poor sleep quality may result and we will be unable to awaken feeling refreshed or rejuvenated. This can seriously impair mental health.
Although emotionally triggering screen media activities like gaming, texting, or viewing activating content aren’t as troubling as real-life trauma, they still stimulate the same brain regions. Limiting activating screen media activities at night and giving your children time to soothe before bedtime will likely result in better quality sleep overall.
ENCOURAGE A SOOTHING NIGHTTIME RITUAL
We are creatures of habit. Habitual activity during the 30-minute bedtime wind-down signals the body to anticipate rest. Components of a soothing ritual may include soft lighting, quiet repetitive sounds, and comforting activities. Avoid eating, triggering discussions, and intense exercise. Sticking to a consistent bedtime schedule is also important.
STAGE THE ROOM TO BE RESTFUL
I know it’s nearly impossible to motivate teens to unclutter their dens. However, research is clear that a soothing environment contributes to a soothed mind. Offer your support in creating a more grown-up environment with a fresh bedroom makeover that reflects rest and relaxation. Light paint colors, organized closets and bedside tables, subtle lighting, and crisp, cleansing smells can turn a chaotic hovel into a relaxing paradise.
TEACH SOPHISTICATED SELF-SOOTHING STRATEGIES
As a psychologist, I can attest by first-hand experience that cognitive-behavioral exercises like diaphragmatic breathing, progressive muscle relaxation, mindfulness, yoga, imagery, and cognitive restructuring can fend off even the most severe anxiety and mood disorders.
There’s preliminary evidence that screen media delays the onset of sleep, negatively affects sleep quality, and results in difficulty awakening and feeling refreshed. It also decreases REM (rapid eye movement) and sleep time.
Children and adolescents who use screen media at night go to bed later, get fewer hours of sleep, and report more daytime sleepiness. Sending texts or e-mails after initially going to bed increases daytime sleepiness among teens (even if it’s only once/week).
A full cycle of sleep takes 90 minutes. (A full cycle provides cognitive rejuvenation that improves procedural memory and creativity with no sleep inertia.) 10-20 minute power naps are shown to increase alertness and energy. 30 minutes will result in sleep inertia (grogginess). And 60 min is good for slow-wave sleep (helps remember facts but some grogginess).
I’m the mom psychologist who will help you GetYourKidsInternetSafe.
When I clean house I like to talk on the phone. It keeps me from grumbling resentfully about why I spend so many hours a week moving other people’s stuff from one room to the other…as if I’m their SERVANT!
Anyway during one of those phone conversations, my friend told me something that has stuck with me and I feel compelled to clear it up. She said, “You know Tracy that the parents who see GetKidsInternetSafe (GKIS) suspect that you are that hyper-perfect mom who refuses your kids screen technology completely.” I choked on my packaged rice crispy treat, and then we cracked up.
Perhaps the irony hasn’t escaped you that I preach screen media limits through my ONLINE business. Moreover, I have seven (yes seven!) customized social media channels to help me.
And I have three happy, normal kids. I want them to stay that way. I don’t require that they live in a chemical-free room built of moss and dried twigs, drawing with repurposed berry ink and reading only the classics. That is only for #TechFreeTuesdays and #TechFreeThursdays.
The reason I created GKIS is because when I err (which is hardly ever), it is in the direction of being too generous with them. I mean technically, I love them too much. I work tirelessly for their care and am a shameless sucker for their begging. Dudes, I’m actually writing this article in an ear-shatteringly loud, massive volleyball complex that I drove two hours to get to at 5:30 am on a Sunday. I’d post a pic of the game, but the girls’ shorts are too short for public media (not kidding). And for the record, it’s intermission. That’s how much I love my kids.
It’s my love for them and my deep concern for all kids that motivated me to take on this enormous but important GKIS task. I’m not a perfect woman, but I do have some skills motivating and caring for little people. It’s what has allowed me to maintain a busy psychology practice for almost 20 years. From my office, I get the heart-piercing inside view of what all of us are going through and how we are coping.
Frankly fellow parents, we are in over our overly-scheduled, sleep-deprived heads when it comes to the rapid development of screen media technology. We are over-capitulating to slick marketing and our kids’ desperate pleas for the newest electronic device so quickly, that we don’t really know what the heck we are doing! We simply cannot keep up.
Let me just give you a rundown of the issues I’ve seen in my psychology office just within the last few months (details changed to protect confidentiality):
A 12 year-old who is obsessively communicating (and sexting) with an anorexic peer she met on a video game who is cutting and intermittently suicidal
A 14 year-old boy whose grades have been declining because he is logging into too many hours of online porn
A 17 year-old who is healing after he finally reported that his brother had been molesting him with fetish methods learned from online pornography when he was only 9 and 10 years old
A teen who faces expulsion due to videos she posted threatening a peer
A 10 year-old girl who was caught on a porn site and then later discovered to have had a social media account with sexually provocative memes and inviting comments
A 20 year-old who still acts out the dependence she had on her Internet predator from 12 to 14 years old
And a 17 year-old who is seeking psychostimulants because he has already experimented with practically every other class of drug that he expertly shopped for and marketed from his iPhone 6
Of course, some of these ages, genders, and details were tweaked to protect the identity of my patients. But the stories are not exaggerated. These are real children with devoted and fearful parents seeking my reassurance and consult.
The truth is, we don’t even know what all of this technology and inappropriate exposure is doing to our kids’ development. I personally have resorted to the purchase of chaotic herds of bunnies, chickens, pigs, and baby goats to distract my beautiful and precocious 13 year-old (not kidding), not to mention soccer and volleyball…
I’d give my children a life with a variety of healthy activities simply because I deeply want for them to feel awesome. And to do that, I must be a good enough mom. I want everything for them that I can comfortably (and sometimes not so comfortably) muster. That includes healthy distraction, balanced with quiet family time and a well-planned, sensible GKIS toolkit expertly designed for screen media safety.
Let’s face it, until they’ve moved into a home of their own, we will all sometimes worry that there’s a hint of desperation in our parenting generosity, desperation partially motivated by the frenetic bubbles of text messaging and the soft sound of a computer keyboard.
I’m the mom psychologist who will help you GetYourKidsInternetSafe.
I’m a child of the ‘80’s. This essentially means six things shaped my understanding of the world: The Love Boat, Atari (Frogger!), Fast Times at Ridgemont High, being a latchkey kid, the birth of MTV, and the fear of nuclear holocaust. (And yes, as an Internet safety expert, it has not escaped me that four of those six things involved screen media).
Now back to nuclear bombing . . . It sucked being a kid and learning that I had an omnipotent and invisible enemy powerful enough to eradicate Earth. Thanks Cold War for ruining my childhood security.
And OMG, remember the television show The Day After? This lovely little drama depicted a full-scale nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. Nearly 100 million Americans watched the first broadcast, the content of which reportedly inspired then President Reagan to note in his diary that the show was “very effective and left me greatly depressed.” This from the guy in charge of THE BUTTON, also known as THE NUCLEAR FOOTBALL*. Nuclear war made the 1980s super scary.
Flash forward. For research, and to get an idea of the current blood curdling fear tantamount to 1980s nuclear war, I just walked into the playroom and asked my 11 and 13 year olds, “What is your biggest fear?” Now keep in mind, my 13 year-old got second in her school on the super quiz test on ecology without even studying. In other words, I was all giddy for them to say global warming or Internet predators or some such so I could hop back to my computer and develop today’s nuclear football argument…
But true to form, messing up all of my pie-in-the-sky expectations, my children could only come up with was, and I quote, 1) “You” and 2) “Your dancing.” Seriously, that’s what they said.
So besides the fact that my kids are hilarious and wrong about many things (my reverse trailer dance move is unrivaled), I posit our smartphones have personal nuclear football capability. Not for blowing up the planet or whatever, but definitely for blowing up your life.
You’d be shocked, or maybe not, to hear all the ways my patients have ignited their lives with a push of the send button. I know that sounds hyperbolic, but it isn’t. And I’m not just talking about teenagers. I’m talking about sound-minded, responsible adults.
What kind of screen media bombs have I seen detonated?
I’ve seen every type of pathological relationship birthed and every type of secure attachment detonated. I’ve seen wives lose their husbands, husbands lose their wives, best friends betrayed, kids groomed, daters deceived, reputations ruined, jobs lost, car accidents triggered, parents infuriated, and drug deals executed. I even heard of a woman who fell on the escalator while she was texting, resulting in her hair getting tangled in the landing mechanism. I know, arrrggg! I’ve seen an epidemic of powerful destruction facilitated by an impulsive text, a compulsive iChat exchange, or a traumatic video.
Take a second and run a slide show in your imagination of the horrors you have witnessed online. I, for example, still cringe at the memory of videos I’ve seen of people jumping to their deaths from tall buildings, innocent people getting knocked unconscious by malicious pranksters, and spider babies crawling out of its unfortunate victim’s flesh. Shiver. Now imagine a six year-old enduring these images. Nightmare material, indeed!
As a clinical psychologist, we are taught how to nurture our emotional health despite being a daily witness to the ravage of our patient’s emotional safety. Like you, we strive to maintain a healthy lifestyle with solid supportive relationships. And in order to help us work through the pain that we carry as a result, we set up regular consults with our colleagues. During these lunch meetings we speak of our sadness, disgust, anger, fear, and other leftover ashes from the hardest psychotherapy sessions. In order to not burn out or become deeply cynical, we work to deliberately preserve our emotional fitness.
My challenge to you today is to consider what type of emotional fitness strategies do you engage in? Do you take steps to protect yourself from destructive messages, images, and videos? Do you enrich your inner world with healthy relationships and self-care strategies like imagery, mindfulness, and a heart full of compassion? And more specific to GetKidsInternetSafe, have you taught your kids just what they need to do in order to protect themselves and then heal if they take a misstep?
In addition to blocking, filtering, and setting screen media limits, I challenge you to take that extra step and teach them powerful health strategies like good nutrition, sleep hygiene, and exercise. And certainly don’t leave out psychological strategies like mindfulness, imagery, diaphragmatic breathing, and positive thinking. But most importantly, we all must be willing to filter out content that drains our hope, while feeding in content that inspires us like enriching passions and loving friendships.
I’m the mom psychologist who will help you GetYourKidsInternetSafe.
*What is the nuclear football? It is reported to be black briefcase carried by the president’s aid that contains everything necessary to launch a nuclear attack in minutes. According to Bill Gulley, former director of the White House Military Office, the briefcase contains two black books (one with retaliatory nuclear strike options and another classified shelter sites), a manila folder with instructions on how to operate the emergency broadcast system, and an index card with authentication codes. The nuclear football is always within reach of the acting president. Is your smartphone really much different?
You’re reading with the hopes that this is one of those bait-and-switch sensational articles, right? Oh how I wish that was true. Unfortunately, I have run across a phenomenon that few parents know about, and those that do are too ashamed to tell anybody. The ugly truth is that middle school girls, with their immature frontal lobes and tender insecurities, are trying to attract high school boys by texting them sexy images of their blossoming private parts. It’s like they’ve invented an unregulated child porn matchmaking profile that doesn’t even have privacy settings, terms of agreement, or the option to delete the profile. Just a CLICK and SEND and your daughter’s catastrophically nude profile image is available to everybody everywhere forever, no take-backs. Thirty seconds of bad judgment at twelve years old launches a nightmare digital footprint and sullied online reputation. Ouch!
And what about the boys? They enthusiastically log in to this mess too. Some become expert at grooming the girls to send the sexy photos which they then share with their “boyz” on the wrestling team for quickly growing “<city name> nudes exposed!” collections. And to make things more horrifying, the boldest of the boys proudly share their name lists of the virginity prizes personally collected from girls they intentionally targeted who were too young to know any better. Fifteen minutes and these young women have exposed their vulnerabilities, their reputations, and the essence of their true potential. It’s like these teens lost their minds and logged in for an on- and off-line pimp-prostitute internship program. All that was needed was a mobile phone with texting ability and a misguided sense of adventure.
How do I know this? Because I’m a psychologist and the teens I see tell me the shameful truth, all of it; the truths that trigger pride, shame, sadness, and desperation. They tell me all about how they “released their nude” when they turned 12 years old in order to attract attention from the older boys. Or how they were duped into it by the soothing promises from entrepreneurial Romeos, only to find out later that they were lied to and it had been shared over text to the high school football team. There’s also the confessions from the boys that get their “ah-ha! I was being a dirt bag” moment when their frontal lobes come online later in high school. And believe it or not, both genders are capable of being predatory on the other. I hear what most parents don’t know.
I remember the first session when I realized this was a thing. I was seeing a beautiful eighth grade girl who was starting to get it and was lamenting about her best friend who purposely “put a nude out” when she was 11 year old. At 15 years old, the friend was bizarrely proud of it being re-released via text to “everyone in the county” four years later. My client guessed it was the fourth mass texting of the image. I sat there, horrified and dumbfounded, assessing my ethical requirements to the teens involved and my community in general. As a mother, I began visualizing the creation of a blueprint for Rapunzel’s tower in our backyard for my kids, screen-media-free.
So much of my young client’s disclosure made me deeply upset for everybody involved. I was saddened that children this young had already learned how to use and exploit sexuality as a cheap commodity. I was saddened that these kids broker power through contemptuous attention catamount to social media “likes.” I was saddened that there was an army of teenagers willing to receive these tragic misperceptions of self worth. And I was furious that some actively groomed their victims to build a sick collection of lost innocence with no more thought than they gave to their Pokémon collections six months earlier. Keep in mind that in many cases these releases are consensual, while in others coerced.
I imagine you’re thinking, “What kind of amoral community does this writer live in anyway? My kids would NEVER do that!” Right? I’m sorry to tell you that I live in the same community you do. This is not an isolated phenomenon. Participants come from all types of families, families of all income levels and religions with great parents and slack parents. Short of raising your child in a stone tower, there is no family situation where your parenting supervision cannot be breached.
Of course there are situations where children tend to be the most vulnerable. But the temptation is there for even the most well adjusted kids. And to make things even more concerning, this pimp-prostitute culture does not always end by college age. The media is rampant with stories of fraternity houses that have private Facebook pages littered with nude photos of non-consenting women and blatant drug deals, not to mention social media and hookup dating sites flooded with sexual trolling. Like it or not, the young have their own culture of sexuality that is different from their parents.
What has led us here? Is it the unregulated Wild West atmosphere of the Internet? Perhaps it is the moral decay of the Western culture? Perhaps it is the accumulation of sexualization and objectification of women splashed throughout popular culture over decades? Are permissive parents to blame or the rapid technological developments we simply cannot keep up with? And more importantly, what is going to lead us out?
My university students and I discuss this often, and I think you would be surprised how many advocate for mass regulation and filtering while I wonder about the sincerity of their self-righteousness. Because like them, I am conflicted about what makes up our “rights” for online liberties balanced with personal vulgarity and decency standards. Until our legislators are able to fully secure online child pornography portals, some which apparently begin in our own unsuspecting homes, parents must get serious about becoming informed and taking real action. And believe it or not, waiting until your child reaches the teen years to do this is simply too late.
I created GetKidsInternetSafe (GKIS) to provide sensible support and easy-to-implement guides for parents at all stages of the game. After all, the fantasy of locking your child out of technology is simply not realistic. Whether you have a toddler just starting to clamor for her tablet, an elementary schooler playing his first video game, a middle schooler begging for social media, or a high schooler who’s already technologically fluent, it is imperative that you become fluent in screen media activities.
With the help of GKIS, you can become informed, educate your children and set expectations about digital citizenship and online reputation, create a family dialogue about GKIS screen smarts, stage your home, filter and block online portals, set up sensible GKIS family rules and regulations, and most important of all, become your child’s trusted ally and guide should they stumble into an on or offline tangle. Too busy or overwhelmed by the task? Let GKIS be your guide.
I’m the mom psychologist who will help you GetYourKidsInternetSafe.
I’m sitting outside shivering under three fleece layers while seven noisy boys experiment with new ways to get a head injury while screaming like Scottish chieftains in the pool. I’m exhausted. My son is at the tail end of his slumber party.
Last night my husband shuffled out at 2 am to deliver his best threats to get them to surrender to sleep, only to be followed by my award-winning stomping performance at 3 am. Then we heard nothing until 6 am, probably because my brain simply ran out of juice.
You heard me say 6 am right? It’s 10 am now. Thirty minutes till pickup. Thank all that is holy because I’m kinda miserable except that my 21 year old, Morgan, came to hang out with us last night to be part of the chaos that was our son’s birthday happiness.
She just announced she’s going back to her apartment to study in a town an hour away. She has reminded us with piercing clarity that these miserable parenting moments go away too quickly. And then we weirdly long for them. The older kids long for them too, it turns out. Last night Morgan sat with me around the fire pit reminiscing about her fourth grade slumber parties in vivid, grinning detail. It was a precious moment for sure.
Have you ever heard the saying “parenting is full of joy and no fun”? At this moment that dynamic applies in spades. It is during these “no fun” moments when we make our worst parenting mistakes.
This week I’m going to share mine from Tuesday. Of course I risk falling off the expert pedestal that some may put me on, but that’s exactly why I’m doing it. I may have expert parenting advice to share, however the truth is PARENTING IS HARD FOR ALL OF US. We all make stupid mistakes that we flinch to remember. We all get tired and confused and stuck. We all need fresh ideas and rejuvenating experiences to be the “good enough” parent psychologists encourage us to be.
This week is a story about how I failed to practice what I preach with parenting and Internet safety.
My 13-year-old daughter, Sidney, is bright, unflappable, and feisty. When I created www.GetKidsInternetSafe, she announced that she too was going to start a business, on YouTube giving MineCraft advice. I told her she should and that it sounded great, thinking it would be a fun creative venture for her.
Flash forward several months later. I’m checking her computer and find that she has created her own YouTube profile and there are several favorite videos already featured…and one is not appropriate for public profiling. Not terribly bad, but not terribly good either. Very middle school funny, if you know what I mean.
In my 30 Days to Internet Safety video parenting course, I stress how important it is to not rant, shame, or abruptly yank away privileges when you find that your child has not used good screen media judgment. Instead, use it as a learning opportunity. If you must consequate, be sensible. Don’t overdo or take away screen media by habit or your kids will learn that it’s a bad idea to come to mom or dad when Internet issues arise. And arise they will, for all of our kids, regardless of how careful and brilliant we may be in our strategies.
You hear where this is going?
Well, in this situation it didn’t take me long to rant and shame as I deleted everything; scolding her for proceeding without my permission and using poor judgment. Lecturing her about her online reputation and the risks of the digital footprints. All of it. It was kind of ugly and my bold, brilliant child started to cry.
I realized I’d kind of blown it, but didn’t want to crumble fully in that my message was important and some impact resulting from the situation was important as a reality check.
The next day I apologized for my overreaction. It became evident to me that I was partly worried about my credibility being ruined as an online expert if the YouTube channel were to be discovered. And I felt ashamed. I let my emotions override my empathy. It was the next day when she told me that she thought she had my permission. That the borderline inappropriate video she’d watched was super funny to middle schoolers. And that she thought those videos were only viewable to the user, not to the public. And the truth was, I wasn’t sure. I was too busy having a shame spiral spasm of my own to effectively hold Sidney’s emotional well being securely in the forefront of my mind. I was in a selfish panic really.
I’m not telling this story to administer a masochistic flogging, but to acknowledge that parenting is impossible to get right at every opportunity.
We all screw up, we all rant, and we all get selfish. But when we fill our hearts with compassion for our kids AND OURSELVES, we are more likely to stay on course. We are more likely to consider their developmental perspective, allow them the freedom to explore, and to validate their experience as we provide them with wise and gentle guidance (and if you live in our chaotic but loving home, to laugh at ourselves later among those we love, kids included). Because there’s really no better gift you can give your kids than a loving acknowledgement that failure is a part of life. If you are living a full one, those failures never go away, whether you’re 13 or 47 years old.
I’m the mom psychologist who will help you GetYourKidsInternetSafe.
Onward to More Awesome Parenting,
Tracy S. Bennett, Ph.D.
Mom, Clinical Psychologist, CSUCI Adjunct Faculty
GetKidsInternetSafe.com
