Good Digital Parenting Is the Challenge of Our Age
“I don’t have a kid, but I have a nephew that I put some boundaries on. There are some things that I won’t allow; I don’t want them on a social network.”
Uncle Tim — aka Tim Cook, CEO of Apple — certainly isn’t alone in thinking hard about how children are growing up in an age of smartphones, social networks, and constant connectivity.
His predecessor was even stricter: Steve Jobs’ children were famously iPadless: “They haven’t used it. We limit how much technology our kids use at home,” Jobs told New York Times journalist Nick Bilton in 2010.
Eight years on, the challenges of digital parenting are, if anything, even more daunting. That’s because the current generation of parents are still getting to grips (and, frankly, often floundering) with technology’s impact on their own lives.
We’re the generation who overshared on MySpace/Facebook (delete according to which end of the generation you’re from), slid unsuspectingly into problematic smartphone habits, shared fake news and joined Twitter pitchfork mobs, and set ourselves the unattainable target of Inbox Zero.
