As a reminder, TDSU’s approach to teaching kids when and how to disengage from online interactions consists of four stages:
- Laying the foundation
- Looking for signs of developmental growth
- Supervised practicing
- Increasing independence
In Stage 1, while you are delaying access to online interactions, you are laying the foundation for learning by modeling, narrating, and normalizing. You are showing your child good digital habits, you are recounting out loud how you interact online, and you are setting the expectation that you will be involved in your child’s online life just like you are involved in their offline life. And by doing all of this you are creating a shared language around, and a set of shared expectations about, your digital lives.
Modeling: show don’t tell
Narrating : Recount out loud
Normalizing: Set Expectations
So what does it look like to model, narrate and normalize the three skills in Stage 1?
Let’s take an example of how you model pausing. Let’s say you take a cute photo of your child and you want to text it to Grandpa. But before you send it, you pause to ask your child’s permission to share their image (and you listen to them if they exercise their independence and say”no”!). You are showing your child that it is important to get permission before posting or sharing images of others.
You might narrate how you handle confusing, sensitive or emotional online interactions. Demystify Your Digital Life and recount out loud what you are doing online. Imagine you are hanging out with your child while texting with a friend and you say, “I just got this text from my friend, and they wrote something I don’t totally understand. I’m going to move this conversation offline and suggest we talk about this the next time we see each other.” You are recounting out loud when and how you move conversations offline.
How do you lay the foundation for your child to reach out to a trusted adult when they encounter something online that is too big for them to handle? You want to normalize talking about what happens online – just like you talk about what happens offline.
You know about what is going on in your child’s offline life because you ask them questions, you show interest in things they are interested in, you ask to see their homework and things they have created, you play with them. These are all ways that you create the expectation with your child that as a family you communicate about what’s going on in your lives.
The same should be true with your online lives. How do you normalize these conversations? It starts with you.
If you find yourself feeling bad while scrolling through Instagram, talk about it! Let your child know you are deleting the app because it isn’t serving a positive purpose for you. Normalize having conversations about how being online can make you feel and what you can do about it. This is a great way to lay the foundation for taking care of your mental health while interacting online.
Help your child think about what different emojis might mean and how others might interpret them. For example, when you text your sister using a fun emoji, show it to your child and talk about why you picked that image and what it means. By doing this, you are normalizing being thoughtful and intentional about how you communicate online. You are also showing your child that in your family, what happens online gets talked about.
Were you enjoying cute puppy videos on TikTok but now you find yourself with a feed full of butter carving videos? Talk with your child about how an algorithm works – about how it pays attention to what you linger on, even if it’s just for a few seconds, and then adjusts your feed, showing you things that it thinks you want, not things that you’ve asked for. Normalize being savvy about what’s going on behind the scenes when you are interacting online.
Online communication can be tricky in the absence of tone. Before you send a text message, read it to your child and ask them if they think it makes sense or if it could be misconstrued depending on how it’s read. You are normalizing reviewing your texts or posts before you hit send, keeping in mind how what you are writing could be received.
Getting kids involved in your online life – where appropriate – sets the expectation that you will be involved in theirs from the start.
Don’t just follow your kids online. Lead them.
