Checking Your Child's Digital Communications - Right or Wrong?

While working with schools close to home this month, when a teacher raised his hand and asked me for the definitive answer to parents checking their children's digital devices and communications. Is it right or wrong? Apparently other experts have provided conflicting answers. I responded that there is no right or wrong answer - "it depends." (I am a lawyer, that is our default answer to everything!)

And it does depend. It depends on your relationship with your child. It depends on their age. It depends on whether they are risk-adverse or high-risk. It depends if they are curious or sensitive or highly-manipulable. It depends on your method of parenting. It depends on your spare time and if you can read 10,000 text messages a month.

That, I explained was what we would be learning together. How to give parents choices, not rules. The teacher politely accepted my answer graciously.

When we got to the car, my husband said that teachers need choices too. They need rules they can share and they need to understand the process to making choices and teaching parents and students what those choices are. He (gently) informed me that I had not answered the teachers question. And, looking back, I agreed with him.

Hard and fast rules are good for the start. Before you learn what your choices are and how to make them, we need somewhere to begin. So, I will provide some basic rules, but you need to do a few things first if you want me to avoid "it depends."

Understand the Landscape: All parents should talk with their children about life, digital and physical. Who are their friends, where do they go, when is it homework/family/free time? What is their life and day like?

Know Your Child: Is your child sensitive? Is your child resilient? Is digital the main part of their life or merely a way to hold real life together? Do they have multiple interests and hobbies? Are they involved in athletic or physical activities?

Are they outgoing/shy/private or open? Are they high-risk? Is there a history of at-risk activities? Are they specially-abled/especially intelligent or learning-challenged? Are there physical challenges? Do they fit-in easily or are they loners? How do they handle confrontations? Are they involved in community activities, clubs, competitions, scouts or other youth leadership groups? Are they generally happy/withdrawn/depressed/angry? Do they see life as half-full or half-empty?

Understand Their Environment: How are they doing in school? Are they struggling with something or someone? Are they vulnerable? Are there special challenges they are facing now - moving to a new town or school, loss of a family member or friend, financial stress within the family, divorce, parents undergoing a stressful time, parent separated by deployment, business travel, etc.?

Have they been bullied at home by siblings, at school by classmates or online by anyone? Have they recently broken up with a romantic interest or had a falling out with a friend? Any big change in their lives, directly or directly through the family or their friends?

Evaluate Your Relationship with Your Child: Are you very close and do you share everything? Are you their "best friend?" Are you a more traditional parent? Are you divorced or separated and have limited interactions with your child? Do you engage in activities together or have common interests?

Is the relationship temporarily stressed right now? Has it changed for the worse? Do they hang on your every word or ignore you entirely? Do they hide things from you or confide in you, or does it depend on what they are hiding or confiding?

Any special conflicts? Do you have frequent non-digital device meals together? Do you pass each other on your way out and their way in? Or is it a warm and loving relationship? Highly-disciplined or "trust them" they do what's right or something in between?

Why are these three things important? Stressful times, changed environments, challenges, family losses, breakups, moves - these often have an adverse effect on your child's self-worth, resiliency and support-systems.

Trust, if you don't have it already, won't be improved overnight. Offline challenges quickly move online, and online move offline. And vulnerabilities become bigger and more exposed online. Without strong offline, physical relationships and activities, pent up energy, hormones and frustrations are let loose online.

As they grow up and become interested in romantic relationships, even the most open parental-child relationships change. They now have things they are not as comfortable sharing with you. As the read-communications-or-not-choice rears its head, understand that their wanting to keep crushes, new love and romance private may be the biggest part of any push-back on your supervision. And you must be very careful and honest with yourself and them as to why you are considering reading their communications - to keep them safe from creeps and risks online or to spy on what they are doing, how far they have gone and with whom in real life?

The more resilient they are in life, the more offline interests and activities they have, the more stable their home live, school live and social lives, the less you have to worry about their acting out or taking outrageous risks online. But rarely do our lives line-up so well, and even normally resilient children can become severely at-risk because of other things going on in their lives. By keeping an eye out for these unsettling situations, you may be able to predict risks.

The Basics - Rules

Google Your Kids: set up Google (and Bing, Instagram, Snapchat, etc.) alerts for your kids. Use their full name, email address, cell phone numbers, nicknames, screen names, etc. and put any more than one word in quotes so that the search engines will search for the group of words instead of each separately.

I should be searched for as "Parry Aftab" to find me. Otherwise, you will find every "Parry" and every "Aftab" reference online. Search under images, videos and the web. (I'll teach you in another post what to do if you find something that shouldn't be there.)

By setting an alert, you'll receive an email when new items are discovered. Consider it your early warning system. You may want to set up alerts for their best friends (just in case), and one for yourself and other members of your family.

Set Disconnected Time: The earliest surveys I ever did showed a direct relationship between the amount of time spent using digital technologies and levels of risk-taking. Our parents wanted us to come straight home from school because the temptation of smoking, drinking or otherwise getting-into trouble was a direct result of unsupervised time away from home. Think of their time online as being away from home, unsupervised.

Make sure they have time offline, disconnected and reading, playing sports/games, spending time with friends offline and family, etc. Their growing brains need the quiet disconnected time and it keeps them safer.

The trick is determining homework time, important day-to-day communications with friends and a generous amount of time for checking things out, shopping, listening to music, etc. Then, set the rest as disconnected time. We have some new initiatives to get families to cook together, without texts, calls or apps, for two hours a month. You'll hear more about that later.

Improve the "Filter Between Their Ears": While many cybersecurity or entertainment companies offer filters, white lists of safe sites and child-friendly apps that can be helpful especially with younger children and preteens, the best filter is the one between our children's ears. Judgment. We will get much further by teaching our children values than prohibiting access. And, in turbulent times, what we teach them offline is crucial.

Teach them self-respect and respect for others. Teach them that what happens online doesn't always stay only online, and it lasts for ever. Teach them the importance of integrity, kindness, empathy and tolerance. And remember them yourselves.

Use Filters or White Lists for Preteens: Younger surfers, 10 and under, don't need full-size Internet access. Filters are designed to block the bad stuff, and work well to block adult content. They don't block hate, drugs and misinformation as well, but most parents worry more about porn than those. To make sure that everything is child-friendly, you need white-lists, pre-screened (by eyeballs) sites, apps, videos, games, etc. which act like walled-gardens, allowing access only to those digital assets.

Use Filtered Family-Friendly Search Features for Tweens and Young Teens: Google, Bing and other search engines, even app platform searches offer family-friendly-features that block porn and certain other high-risk child-inappropriate sites and resources. If they are actively searching for adult content, it won't be much of a deterrent. But, it will help them avoid adult content they aren't seeking. It prevents accidental exposure.

Have the Talk!: The best time to talk to your children about cyberbullying, sexting, bad things they may encounter online, creeps, values and being their first place to go for help when things in life go wrong is now, before they need it. Promise not to over-react. Promise not to blame them. Promise not to pick up the phone and call the FBI, Home Office, RCMP, their friends' parents or me. Promise not to make things worse.

Don't Over-React!: If they do come to you when something goes wrong, understand that you won't have the answers to everything that goes wrong. But you can find them. You can visit our Facebook Stop Cyberbullying page or visit my site, StopCyberbullying.org or WiredSafety.org or so many other great online resources to get help.

But you can be an immediate and accessible safe place to land. Hug them before calling your local family lawyer, or the school principal or Instagram. Tell them that everything will be okay. Distract them and try and give them something offline to do.

Then stuff a washcloth in your mouth, in secret, in the bathroom and scream...but when you face them, look calm and composed. Let them believe, true or not, that you can handle this and they are not facing this alone. They need to know that somewhere they are safe. There is someone who will not judge them because of their weight, pimples, bad decisions or differences. And you should be that someone.

If your relationship is not very solid right now, give them a trustworthy alternative - a cousin, aunt, uncle, older sibling, someone else they can turn to if they are worried about turning to you right now. And warn that other person and get their agreement to act as your "trusted adult" proxy.

Rules ot get you started. But more to come...