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
During stage 4 you are increasing independence as appropriate, assessing if your child’s access to online interactions is appropriately aligned with their demonstrated strengths and capabilities. Because neither development nor learning are linear, expect to see successes and setbacks, these are all a part of the learning process, and you can scale back access and increase supervision as needed.
Your child will begin to integrate and master TDSU’s three basic skills through significant amounts of supervised practice and ongoing modeling, narrating, and normalizing. They will begin to show more and more developmental growth over time. Any increase in independence should be aligned with your particular child’s developmental readiness and skill acquisition, and not a particular age or because “everybody else is doing it.”
Even if you aren’t yet at the stage of increasing independence, it is important for your child to know that you are working with them towards this shared goal. Kids think very short term, so when you say “you can’t have a smartphone,” or “you aren’t ready for snapchat” – what they hear is “this is never going to happen.” It is easier to get kids on board with laying the foundation, delaying access, and the learning process if you let them know that you are both working towards an eventual increase in independence.
How do you increase independence?
Let’s assume you’ve been supervising your child’s practice of TDSU’s Three Basic Skills as described here. So if your supervision technique was to have your child texting just with you before, an increase in independence might be allowing them to text with a friend or small group of peers either (a) with you on the text chain, or (b) you sitting with your child while they review messages and respond.
Once your child demonstrates that they have started to master Pausing, Moving Communication Offline, and recognizing when they need to Reach Out, you may consider increasing their independence by allowing them to text with a friend with an incremental step-down in your supervision. For instance, you might decide to review your child’s text messages with them sporadically, for example daily or weekly – whatever works best for your family. You are looking for instances where you can celebrate their successful use of TDSU’s Three Basic Skills or places where you may need to have further conversation or more learning is needed.
In addition to this increase in independence, you may still want to consider only allowing access to online interactions when you are in a room together. This allows you to take notice of how your child is reacting emotionally to what is happening online. You can also use this as an opportunity to gently remind your child to pay attention to how they are feeling, how long they’ve been online, or if what they are seeing online is or is not serving a positive purpose for them. Be certain to celebrate your child’s successes with them as they gain emotional maturity when interacting online.
This same process of incrementally increasing independence holds true for introducing your child to any online interactions, like social media and gaming apps.
Don’t just follow your kids online. Lead them.
