As a researcher studying children, families, and digital media, I often find myself cornered by anxious parents. They see their tweens and their friends hunched over smartphones and voice a familiar set of fears: “I’m concerned my kids have no social skills,” “I think my child is addicted to games,” or “I’m worried they’ll be cyberbullied or see something that destroys their innocence.”
This anxiety is a normal part of the cycle that happens whenever a new technology changes our relationship with time and space. People once feared trains moving over 30 miles an hour and worried the telephone would destroy family life. But recognizing this cycle doesn’t mean there’s nothing to worry about. It means we might be worrying about the wrong things. We focus on salacious headlines instead of a more important question: What kind of people will our children become in this digital world?
The Spy Trap: Are We Asking the Right Questions?
Many parents ask me, “Should I spy on my kid? Should I monitor every text and post?” My question back to them is always: “What would you be looking for?” Their texts are likely to be incredibly boring. Before we go down the road of surveillance, we need to ask ourselves if we’ve done a good enough job modeling the right behavior. The goal isn’t to catch them doing the wrong thing, but to guide them toward doing the right thing.
The real solution isn’t found in a monitoring app, but in a shift in our approach. We need to get genuinely curious.
Curiosity is the Key: Understanding Their Digital Habitat
If we want to raise kids who are thoughtful and use digital communication for positive outcomes, we need to understand what it’s actually like to be a 10-year-old with a smartphone. What is it like to watch a slumber party you weren’t invited to unfold on social media in real time? We need to appreciate both the amazing possibilities for creativity and authorship, and the challenging social pieces that aren’t so easy.
In my research, I sit down with groups of 10-to-12-year-olds and tell them, “You are the experts.” And they are. They put on their expert hats and offer incredibly high-level insights and solutions to the problems they face. Through these conversations, we’ve co-created some imaginative “apps” that highlight their core struggles and the human solutions we can all practice.
The Apps We Don’t Need (But the Conversations We Do)
The Problem #1: The Pressure for Instant Response
Kids feel they need to be accessible 24/7. If they text a friend and don’t get an immediate reply, it’s easy to spiral into anxiety, thinking, “This person doesn’t want to be my friend anymore.” This leads to a cascade of repeated texts.
- The Imagined App: “Text Lock” – an app that limits the number of texts you can send to someone who isn’t responding within a certain time window.
- The Real App: Empathy. The solution isn’t a digital lock. It’s teaching kids to close their eyes and imagine what their friend might be doing homework, eating dinner with their family, shooting hoops. The least likely scenario is that the friendship is over. This simple act of perspective-taking builds empathy and patience.
The Problem #2: Unintentional Hurt in a Text-Only World
Without tone of voice or facial expressions, it’s easy to send a message that comes across as unintentionally mean.
- The Imagined App: “Sparkle Chat” – an app that pops up with a simple question before you send a message: “Are you sure you want to send that?” For new users, they even suggested that if you ignore the warning and send it anyway, a copy goes to both the sender’s and recipient’s parents.
- The Real App: Mentorship. This brilliant idea shows that kids, despite their tech-savviness, crave guidance. They need our help to navigate tricky communications, to learn how to avoid causing hurt, and how to fix it when it happens. They need our wisdom more than they need our monitoring.
The Problem #3: Inaccessible Parents
In a powerful role reversal, every single group of kids I’ve spoken to has identified a central issue: the most important people in their lives are often inaccessible because of technology. They feel their parents are lost in a “cloud” of their own.
- The Imagined App: “Stop Texting, Enjoy Life” – a voice-activated app for parents’ phones that their children can use to shut the device down.
- The Real App: Presence. Our children are turning the timer back on us. They want our attention, especially at the age when they are getting their own devices. When your child is trying to talk to you, the “app” is to mentally picture that little bird and decide: “Stop texting, enjoy life. I’m here now.”
Tech-Savvy Meets Wisdom
There is no app that can raise our children for us. What they need is our mentorship. They carry the tech-savvy, but we hold the wisdom. We know what it’s like to be left out, to have a friendship fracture, to need a break from social demands.
Our job is not to spy, but to get curious. We need to ask them what they’re thinking, listen to their day-to-day experiences, and then co-create solutions with them that leverage their creativity and our life experience. The goal is to guide them toward becoming thoughtful, empathetic people who can harness the incredible power of the digital world for good.