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5 Myths About Internet Safety

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Originally published by AdmireMoms

I’m a psychologist, a university lecturer, and a mom. Guess which job is the hardest? I’m not going to say that establishing screen safety in your home is easy. But I will say that, with support like GetKidsInternetSafe and plans like those in my Screen Safety Toolkit it’s totally doable and mega important. The fallout I see in my clinical office from poor safety planning is truly tragic. If you’re telling yourself one of these 5 myths, I encourage you to take some time and flush out an effective screen safety plan. You will rest so much easier once you do. On to the 5 myths I too often hear about Internet safety.

 

I SURVIVED IT, SO WILL THEY

When I think back about my childhood I grimace about the seven shades of peril I was often in. As latch key kids roaming the neighborhood in hoards, we were mostly in danger of falling out of trees and talking to strangers. Yes abduction was a concern, but neighbors were ever watchful and quick to reprimand us and tell our parents when we stepped out of line. (Sorry about the ding-dong ditching and prank calls Mr. and Mrs. Wong).

As an Internet safety expert and clinical psychologist, the online peril kids face today is far more insidious than that of yesteryear. Online predators don’t drive up and grab kids off the street. Instead they stalk them virtually on social media and chat rooms. With slow, steady contact they can gather a shocking amount of personal information that they utilize to form a relationship. They don’t need to grab them, the kids are coerced to come to them. Sprinkle in other risks like cybersecurity, exposure to inappropriate violent and sexual content, and cyberbullying and one can easily see online risks are real. This isn’t falling out of trees and reading your cousin’s Playboy magazine anymore.

 

WE TALKED ABOUT IT, SO NOW THEY KNOW BETTER

Education is an awesome first step to good online problem solving and resilience. But it isn’t enough. Kids may seem wise with their bravado and impressive technology expertise, but they’re not great at recognizing future consequence.

There’s a good reason for that. In the first 25 years of life the brain is undergoing massive remodeling. Brain cells that aren’t being used are dying off while others grow in synchronized and preplanned patterns among various brain regions. As a result, specialized skills emerge with each developmental phase.

The prefrontal region of the brain, the seat of judgment and problem solving, is among the last to mature. That means that kids don’t have the brain wiring to reason through complex online social situations, even if they’ve been told of the risks. Parents need to be present and alert every day to make up for those deficits and help them build resiliency skills throughout childhood. It’s a process rather than a one-time intervention.

 

IF I DON’T ALLOW IT, THEY’LL SNEAK IT ANYWAY

Let’s be honest, that’s a cop out. Yes it’s intimidating to program parental controls on screen devices and set up screen safety rules and structure, but the risk of letting this go is simply too high. I treat middle schoolers addicted to porn and high schoolers flunking out due to sleep deprivation from gaming and social media, among other serious problems. GetKidsInternetSafeis my way of supporting families preventively rather than treating issues after the fact. If done right, sneaking and hacking won’t undo the benefits. Parents need to do their jobs well to protect kids effectively. With support, screen safety is not as hard as most parents think.

 

EVERYBODY’S DOING IT, IT’S JUST THE TIMES

It does seem like everybody’s doing it, but that doesn’t mean your kids should. Overly restricting technology will interfere with your children’s academic and social well being, and so will being too permissive with screen media. It’s worth being that parentwho commits to a strategy and negotiates it actively as your children grow. That kind of active, warm, fun engagement also strengthens the parent-child relationship. When they see how awesome your kids are doing, other parents will follow your lead. That means your children’s friends will also be less likely to browse into trouble.

 

PARENTAL CONTROLS FILTER ADEQUATELY, PLUS I CHECK THEIR BROWSER HISTORY. I’M GOOD ON SCREEN SAFETY.

Of man . . . if only. Tech is getting more sophisticated and user friendly for sure, but nothing beats old-fashioned human ingenuity to come up with work arounds. The truth is, inappropriate content will show up on your children’s screens. It just will. Recently a teacher friend told me a story that she was looking up “big mouth bass” with a bunch of first graders, and by some horrifying stroke of the key an explicit body part filled the screen. She mimed what it was like to slap at the keyboard while launching her body in front of the screen, all while trying not to scream hysterically. This followed by several uncomfortable telephone conversations with, thankfully, understanding parents.

So what can we do? Build a powerful parent-child relationship, set up filtering and monitoring tech, and develop innovative parenting strategies to keep screen use moderate and safe. No need to be overly restrictive or overly permissive. And as a mom and psychologist, I urge honesty and transparency. Don’t risk losing your credibility by spying and ambushing your kids with online discoveries. Let them know from the beginning that you love them enough to be engaged with their nonvirtual AND virtual selves.

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

Reboot Your Parent-Child Relationship

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This morning I watched the sweetest parenting guilt video ever! It’s an ad for Ikea that shows kids writing to the Three Kings (Santa) about what they want for Christmas. After they proudly seal their list for mailing (Wii, guitar, iPad), the teacher asks them to write a letter to their parents listing what they want from them. After some cute kid pencil biting the video cuts to the parents reading the letters aloud.

CLICK HERE to read more…

Smartphones During Homework?

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Are you fighting the homework wars? Wondering if screens during homework are helping or hurting grades? We can’t take screens away during homework time anymore. So much of it is online! Kids insist that tech helps them learn better. But does it? Today’s GKIS article covers who tech can help with learning and how it can interfere.

How We Learn

We have to have a good memory to earn good grades. To learn, we must encode, or anchor, that information into brain memory storage. This type of learning happens as we engage with the material over and over. Memories also encode while we sleep. Changing short-term memories into long-term memories happens through biochemical and electrical processes called consolidation.

Different types of memories store in different parts of the brain. Memorizing factual information (required to perform well on tests) primarily involves the part of the brain called the temporal cortex. Intentionally learning facts is called explicit memory.

Memorizing how to do something, like tie your shoes, is called procedural learning. It is stored in the areas of the brain that involve motor control. This kind of learning is called implicit memory.

Emotional memories (like those that occur in traumatic situations) are stored in multiple brain areas including our emotional center, the amygdala.

Research suggests that kids studying while watching TV may encode that information as procedural rather than factual data. Encoding in the wrong brain region makes fact retrieval at test time more difficult. How and where you study also makes a difference.

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To learn well, we must start with great brain health, get motivated, set up a good workstation, and follow best learning practices. Are you practicing these learning techniques?

  • Good self-care, brain health, and cognitive fitness are the foundations of learning engagement (like sleep, nutrition, exercise, and a positive mood)
  • A distraction-free study environment
  • Efforts toward mental engagement: attention and motivation
  • Putting the learning content in a variety of different formats (listening to a lecture, reading notes, writing notes, re-writing notes, watching videos, engaging in discussion, etc.)
  • Memorizing material in a variety of study environments
  • Making unique meaning of the material, such as generalizing and applying the concepts, especially with emotional connections
  • Repetition and practice
  • Avoid doing two tasks at once that require the same cognitive resources (don’t multitask)
  • Uninterrupted brain rest after each study session (mindfulness, meditation, time out in nature)

The Benefits of Screen Time for Learning

Screen devices can be amazing learning aids. Not only do they help us put the material in different formats, but they are fun and convenient to use! Here are some of the ways screen time benefits our learning.

  • With our screen devices, we have immediate, easy access to massive stores of information.
  • The biohacks built into our devices make learning fun. We are captured and motivated.
  • Online quizzes and testing help us immediately assess where we are with our learning.
  • Learning programs dish out progressively challenging content at a pace that matches our performance.
  • Screens give us access to others for group discussions and crowdsourcing problems.
  • Screens offer cool and create learning formats, like project management and brain mapping systems.
  • Gamifying content helps us learn and have fun!

 

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Best Learning Strategies

1. Learn from the get-go.

Don’t waste a moment of studying. Be an active learner the minute you come into contact with the material. Actively engage with the content while you read the textbook, take notes in class, and watch the videos. Participating in class also helps deep processing of the material!

2. Learn while you format study materials.

Outline the text and rewrite and highlight your notes. Attend to and connect the main concepts. Leave out illustrative details so you have only essential material (fewer pages) to memorize.

3. Set the stage to study.

Block out sufficient study time over several days using a block-scheduling download from the Internet. Prepare yourself and your study space to optimize learning. Make sure you are comfortable and fit (fed, hydrated, rested) with a positive attitude about studying. Find a comfortable, non-distracting study location. Turn off your phone and other notifications and commit to studying only, no social media or Internet surfing.

4. Engage with content, don’t kill and drill.

For a student to learn effectively, they must engage with the content and integrate it into a meaningful framework. Students often make the mistake of mindlessly rehearsing isolated facts, thinking time spent is evidence of learning. Kill and drill is a waste of time and mind-numbingly punishing. Deeply processing information is the best way to learn.

5. Create learning pathways.

Each time we encode a fact into the hippocampal area (memory center) of our brain, we create a learning pathway to that content that can later be traveled for retrieval at test time. Increasing the number of pathways to that encoded fact is the process of effective learning.

In items 2 and 3 of this list, you already paved the initial pathways! The first pathways include when you listened to the lecture, wrote notes, read the textbook, answered the teacher’s questions, and formatted study materials.

To pave additional pathways to test content, find creative ways to further engage with and elaborate on the material while you study. The more emotionally and cognitively meaningful the material is for you, the easier it will be to learn. For example, use the Internet to view the study material in a variety of vivid formats, such as illustrative maps, diagrams, pictures, speeches, or videos. Link the information to emotionally meaningful memories or associated topics. Study from a variety of locations. Form a study group and talk with others about the content.

6. Rehearse the information and practice retrieving it and applying it just like you would at test time.

If the test is multiple-choice, make up questions that would lead to memorized facts. If the test is an essay, practice outlining and writing essays on that material.

7. Study small chunks of material at a time over several days, eventually linking the chunks together.

Don’t cram at the last minute. Your brain needs time to deeply process newly learned material. It will even process when you’re not actively studying, even in your sleep! That means it’s best to learn and rehearse chunks of material over several days. By test time, the chunks will come together for easy, A+ retrieval.

 

Fostering the love of learning is the best thing we can do with our kids, that means helping them learn better and achieve a healthy balance on- and off-screen. For more learning tips, view my free video, “How to Study Effectively: Metacognition in Action.” 

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

The Third Baby Then…And Now. How a Blunt Soccer Mom’s Advice Lead to the Smartest Decisions I Ever Made

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Young family of five people watching a movie
Young family of five people watching a movie

Originally published by Ten to Twenty

When I was pregnant with my third child, a stranger walked up to me on the soccer field and gave me the most compassionate, rudest, wisest advice I’ve ever received. She said, “I’m going to tell you something nobody else will tell you. Having a third child changes EVERYTHING. You’re going to have to get a new car, a new house, and people will stop inviting you over.” And before I could respond, she walked away.

That quickly I was left less glowy, stunned, and speechless, unable to tell if I’d just been insulted or nurtured. But considering my haze of pregnancy idealism, illustrated by the “I want it sassy!” moment of horrific judgment at the hair salon the day before, I had it coming. It turns out she was exactly right. Several months later after the blissful delivery of that third fat, fat baby (his nickname for the first two years), we quickly graduated to a midsize SUV, a bigger house, and became the lepers of family barbeques.

The fat, fat baby happened to be the easiest of all of my kids. It wasn’t his behavior that ousted us. It was the number “5” on the RSVP card. It did our social lives in. But we didn’t actually care, because the truth was, three kids also made even the simplest of outings completely exhausting. We now had a sulking tween, a giddy toddler that could run into the elevator and hit close before we could catch her, and a fat, fat baby that strained every caregiver’s back he every had. True story.

So now, I’m that mean stranger lady giving you unwanted but sage advice. Here it is. Unless you’re one of those magnificent manicured mothers that can effortlessly quiet a sobbing baby and frantic toddler throughout a plane flight and then rest without resentment in the hotel room during naptime while everybody else tastes the exotic delicacies of your most recent vacation destination, then this article is for you.

If you’re having your third baby, vacations as you once knew them are now gone. Plane flights will be chaotic, exhausting, and outrageously expensive. One hotel room will no longer cut it, doubling your vacation budget. And forget about pleasing everybody in the family. Somebody’s going to be miserable (like adults and tween), because you will be catering to the youngest child by necessity.

At nine months pregnant due to the inspiration from that blunt soccer mom, I had the foresight of a bedraggled not-sassy shaman. I detonated any hope of a near-future vacation budget and remodeled the kitchen and put in a pool. I painted the bathroom walls a soothing citrine and sprinkled the living room with China Pear scented tea lights. The master bedroom became a Moroccan-inspired Mommy escape and the backyard was swiftly littered with genius distractions like a trampoline, hoola hoops, and a zip line. During this frantic survivalist outfitting, I also surrendered my insistence of sorted pencil drawers and matching socks. In a sentence, I transitioned our home into a constantly cluttered and littered with fishy-crackers staycation paradise.

Now that my kids are older (21, 13, and 11 years old), we can occasionally venture out of the house for fun. And we do. But no longer does the pool and hoola hoops cut it in regard to keeping them happy at home. And, once again, I employed big home structural strategies to keep us balanced. In a sentence, I identified each child’s passion and exploited it!

What do I mean by “exploit?” I mean that in order to take respite from entertaining the kids myself or allowing them to vegetate in front of screen media for too many soul-killing hours, I deliberately sprinkle their passions throughout our home so they nourish themselves with a variety of healthy activities. Here are three examples from my three kids:

My oldest daughter lives away for college now. From a very early age, she was a chatty, social child and an only for her first eight years. Little could distract her from following me around chattering incessantly. Other than her telling the grocery store clerk our most embarrassing moments, repeatedly, her chirpy little prattle was adorable. But a mom needs a break on occasion.

My secret distractor for her was crafts. When her friends helped her sort through her room before she moved out (sob), they excavated 2.4 tons of half-complete crafts kits. These projects may have only distracted her for short moments, but they were necessary moments indeed. Although she doesn’t half-craft anymore, she is a senior in college and still talking to me. So that’s a good endorsement.

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My middle daughter LOVES animals. She got this from me, although I’m not allowed to say that, because she will sassily say, “I’m my OWN person.” We have miraculously held off horse ownership despite weekly begs, because we don’t have those kinds of riches. But animals are the number one way to keep her happy and compliant with screen media restrictions.

Our four-legged/two winged bribes have expanded into what apparently looks to others like animal hoarding. For us, it’s heaven. We now have two dogs, a cat, three bunnies, seven chickens, two pigs, and two goats that leisurely graze on top of a pet cemetery of critters long lost. I highly recommend this strategy. Although it may not be for you if you’re like my gal-pal Val with her self-described “OCD’s.” She never leaves my house without the comment, “I NEED to go home and take a Valium.” It’s the poop that takes her over the edge, so be sure to realistically assess your limitations.

My youngest son (aka fat, fat baby)…he’s the hardest to distract. He wants video games like his perimenopausal mother needs meds. We’ve had to patchwork his nonvirtual reality with a climbing tree, hip-hop, and his Golden doodle, Reggie. I wish I could show you videos of he and Reggie playing hide and seek. It’s adorable. He throws the ball as far as he can, then frantically runs giggling to some hidey-hole as Reggie tears around whining and frantically searching for his boy. Each reunion is a woofing squealing delight. They will play this for hours. Even though these two smelly, dirty, and now svelte beasts are catastrophically noisy and tail-waggingly destructive, it’s the cutest thing ever. He also swims, climbs trees, listens to loud hip hop, and follows me around whining.

The key to great parenting is obviously staying engaged and connected. But in order to sustain our homes and personal lives as adults outside of just parenting, we must encourage our children’s independence and unique journey to find who they truly are. The trick is staying engaged in a way that is sustainable in a warm, vibrant home, recognizing that a sense of humor and flexibility is the key to family harmony.

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

How to Create an Open, Honest Screen Media Family Conversation Like a Boss

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Teaching kids what they need to know to be best prepared for Internet safety isn’t an easy task for parents. To start with, parents need to form that super-charged connection with their kids so they have BIG influence. One way to connect AND influence is to sprinkle hot tech topics into everyday conversation. My GetKidsInternetSafe blog conveniently serves up weekly information to fuel connecting conversation. Worried about Internet predators, cyberbullying, and online porn? Teach them the assertiveness and problem-solving skills during your chats. Fueling that connection while implementing powerful parenting strategies like those offered in the GKIS Connected Family Online Course create an effortless GKIS family culture. Wondering how to get them jazzed and engaged? Here are some quick tips on how to get the conversation started:

Create an open, honest, and positive family environment.

  • If your kids have a different opinion than yours, have a sense of humor and go with it. Don’t scold or shame them. Encourage them to try out different perspectives.

Play HIGH-LOW.

  • Each person shares the HIGH part of their day and the LOW part of the day. This is a tried-and-true conversation starter!

Start young but recognize it’s never too late to get started.

  • Consider the age of your child and simplify your language accordingly, but don’t be afraid to talk to little ones about hot topics. Sharing your values, opinions, and problem solving style is an awesome opportunity to connect and teach.

Get out there and get tech-savvy.

  • Before your child gets a social media app, test it out first so you know the in’s and out’s. Be eager to let them teach you.

Seek them out to share funny memes and videos.

  • This will quickly become a fun two-way street, an awesome opportunity to engage and stay engaged!

Initiate the conversation with the intention to listen.

  • Don’t lecture, shame, or threaten. If you start with “kids these days…” you’re headed in the wrong direction. Connect rather draw lines between you.

Inform them about hot topics.

Structure conversations about complex situations as a series of legitimate options.

  • Stress that there is rarely one “right” way to respond and that you celebrate mistakes and failures. That’s how we all learn.

Recognize that, in fact, “everybody” IS doing it even if you won’t let them.

  • Have empathy for their dilemma but still stay firm.

Praise.

  • Look for demonstrations of good moral reasoning, assertiveness, and leadership and be generous with worthy compliments.

Don’t scare them but share that people are often inappropriate and unsafe to talk to online.

  • Role-play how to assertively manage these situations. For example, teach them how flattery is used as a manipulation technique.

Can’t figure out how to bring up an uncomfortable topic?

  • Let your kids “overhear” a conversation with your partner at dinnertime. Yes, the walls do have ears.

Be patient.

  • Be prepared to have many small conversations over time rather than one big one.

And there you have it! Some actionable, easy ideas for how to be awesome, even at the end of the day when you feel like an overworked, bedraggled turnip. Please don’t forget to say hi to me on Facebook. I’ve been a little social media lonely lately.

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

 

Photo Credit:

Mommy Sandwich by Theresa Martell, CC by-NC-ND 2.0

Oh Delicious Summertime: 6 Tips to Balancing Nourishing Family Connection and Fun Screen Time

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Remember last summer? You started out strong with fantasies straight from your ‘80’s memories of yummy giggling connection, nourishing sunshine, fresh fruit, and dusty barefoot tree climbing. But then there were closets to sort, kids to feed, and socks to wash . . . Everybody kind of drifted off, positioning themselves in front of their screens. When you tried to chase them off they’d whine and complain and promised “just a minute.” You got tired of nagging, gave in, felt guilty, and promised to rally the next day. Rinse. Repeat. Before you knew it, the summer was gone and all there was to show for it was hours of video games, clean socks, and mommy remorse.

This summer be awesome and proactively prevent the dreaded screen media summer slide

Confession: I’m a mom with kids that have more resolve than I do. If I don’t have an easy plan in place, they wear me down. I’ve raised them to be smart and headstrong and sometimes the inmates run the asylum. Simply put, without a solid workable plan and preplanning, our summer days get thrown together in a tumble.

Here is a quick and doable checklist to help you set a reasonable screen media balance, plan fun family activities everybody will groove on, and most importantly stick to your goals without surrendering to the summer screen sinkhole.

  1. Stage the house for easy supervision and constrained use.

Two powerful and easy ways to stage are to set up GetKidsInternetSafe (GKIS) cowork and family docking stations and insist on no screens behind closed doors or in bedrooms or bathrooms. By cementing habit right from the beginning of summer vacation, you’ll avoid soul-killing nagging and whining, not to mention compulsive use and sneaking that can eventually lead to addiction and problematic activities like sexting or viewing online pornography.

Think your children are too young or have better judgment than that? That’s what families in my therapy sessions thought too. Check out our GKIS Connected Family Online Course if you’d like a powerful but fast and easy blueprint for home staging.

  1. Batten down your cyber security measures.

Keep out tech-cooties by turning on firewalls, cybersecurity software, and educating your kids about malware, phishing, and scamming. Imagine three weeks without screen media while it’s being debugged. How’s that for motivation?

By the way, I spent an hour at the Apple Genius Bar last night clearing adware off my laptop. Because I bought Apple Care, the genius looked through my directories teaching me along the way. He said there are no software programs or user strategies that will prevent adware from loading onto your computer. Adware is now unavoidable. It’s impossible to tell an adware link from any other kind of link. He showed me Apple’s list of ever-changing adware strings (available online) to clean adware on my own or instructed me to simply bring it in to a genius to rapidly search hidden directories for the occasional cleaning.(Apple does not pay me to give you information for the record).

  1. Block schedule blackout times.

By some miracle we successfully trained our inmates to respect #NoTechTuesday and #NoTechThursday during the school week this year. Honestly, I’m more shocked than anybody how easily my kids took to it. After the initial protests, T-days eventually became our best days. I looked forward to coming home to puppy trick training, goat cart pulling, outdoor forts, hide and seek, and even bone piles. Seriously, my two youngest are finally old enough to venture a bit and carefully crafted an adventure into the barranca where they giddily excavated a coyote den. Kind of gross but super educational! No humans died in the process and the pile of bleached bones became an anatomy lesson and effective props for creative horror movie making. (PS my husband says only Southern Californians use the word “barranca.” It means the undeveloped mountain-side by our house.)

Thinking ahead to long summer days, I’ve realized whole tech-free days would be too tough on everybody, especially me! So instead of being a zealot, instead I’m shooting for a balanced tech-activity day setup.

Of course, every child and family is different. I don’t recommend a strict adherence to these guidelines. In fact, we delight in media binge days and screen-free days on occasion. The goal here is for flexibility, spontaneity, and easy-going fun, not prison camp. The most workable and wise plan is to have some days with structured limits and other days where you let your family’s freak flag fly!

#TechTime Guidelines:

DAYLIGHT DELAY

  • No screens until 7 am. Otherwise the boy creeps out earlier and earlier in the morning for eager game play. A sleepy mom makes for a nightmare of a day for everybody. Early morning walks filled with laughter with my BFF is critical for my mental health these days. I recommend.

CHORE CHECK

  • I’ve achieved my happy life from a mix of gift, grit, and fortune. This is where teaching the grit comes in. We try to instill a good work ethic by teaching work before play.

Create a checklist that includes a daily chore and enriching academic task (a worksheet or academic game). Nothing grueling, just an opportunity to self-congratulate that between 9:00-10:00 stuff got done! Getting a little help from the kids takes the edge off of the parental servitude we all complain about.

SWEET SIESTA

  • Maybe you’re still in the sweet naptime stage, but we aren’t. Instead of relying on screen media to shut them down, 11-1:00 allows a leisurely lunch followed by yard play and a lazy read. WHAT? Academic enrichment during the summertime? Yep! Reading is one thing we insist on around here and it has served us well. Sometimes I allow a TED talk or podcast, because they seed stimulating dinnertime conversations.

AFTERNOON ACTIVITY

  • If we haven’t committed to an all-day adventure, then afternoon is rejuvenating adventure time. This may be the beach, swimming, the dog park, or a hike. Other times, it’s a family project like cleaning out the chicken coop or room cleaning. If the kids are whining, I provide a choice between the two types (haha). We try to do something going that makes us laugh and gets us exercise to keep us all from being screen zombies.

What if you’re working? On workdays I rely on kid camps, trades with other moms, or I bribe the 20-somethings to take the little ones out.

TABLE TOGETHERNESS

  • We go old-fashioned everyday and eat around the table and play high-low. No screens allowed. Best part of your day (high)? Worst part of your day (low)?

Ah sweet connection. This is also where we throw in sex-tech educational discussions, organic and easygoing information, often inspired by current events, weaved in with everyday chatter. GKIS FAMILY MEETING – ✔. THIS is what memories are made of, not Web Surfing, MineCraft, and social media stalking.

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  1. Implement our free GKIS Connected Family Screen Agreement.

This is a powerful parenting tool. A “living” agreement is a consistently negotiated, comprehensive contract that closes gaps and prevents work-arounds. Propose ideas, discuss it, and commit to guidelines.

Implementing screen-securing strategies haphazardly just doesn’t work. It’s like installing a screen door on a submarine. Implementing half-baked interventions and then panicking when something happens leads to sneaky spying and intrusive knee-jerk grounding. This is the perfect habitat for resentment and sneaking all the way around.

I’ve witnessed hundreds of times in my practice how a proactive agreement works to build parent-child cooperation and respect. With reasonable justification, even teens appreciate honesty and transparency.

  1. At the launch of summer vacation, calendar 7 day-trip adventures.

Invite the kids to participate in the planning and entice them with maps and websites. Anticipation is almost as fun as the trip itself, and it will fuel follow-thru. Another opportunity to involve the kids in the prep-work instead of being your family’s servant.

Great ideas include new vehicles of transportation (buses, trains, boats, horses) and hikes into exotic neighborhoods (city centers, river walks, mountain strolls). My family makes serious use of the AroundMe app whenever we drive into an unfamiliar area. This transforms Sunday afternoon drives into exotic ice cream tastings or best cheeseburger competitions.

  1. Maintain reasonable expectations. This isn’t Leave it to Beaver.

Let’s face it. None of us are perfect parents.

I cling to the concept of the good enough parent from D. W. Winnicott. He created this concept to affirm that authentic instinct drives parenting better than any expert plan. If you slip into occasional rants and screen media binges, then you’re in awesome company. You know what’s more important than having the perfect parent? Having a loving parent who is a real person.

Do you long for a blueprint that’s delivered in simple video format week by week? I’m here for you! Do you have a specific question you’d like answered? Email me at DrTracyBennett@GetKidsInternetSafe. As the mother of a 21 year-old, I can confirm that deliciously chaotic summers fly by before you know it. Cheers to putting a little effort into planning and making this the best summer you’ve ever had!

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

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