9. Kids and Tech

Emily and Dan discuss tech boundaries, modeling good device behavior, internet safety for kids, and more in this season’s final episode.Social media, cell phones, and all things electronic couldn’t be more important to pivotal children and teens. In this final episode of the season, Emily and Dan unpack today’s issues around tech and kids. Most parents give their children iPads to entertain or educate them while they are busy, but at what point does the device become the babysitter or crutch and your child addicted to the screen? Emily and Dan’s children currently have flip phones, not iPhones, and iPads and they go into why. As parents, we also need to look at our own tech boundaries to see how we are modeling our electronic relationships. Most people aren’t honest with themselves about screen usage and Emily and Dan offer suggestions for modeling good device behavior with your kids. Internet safety for kids on social media and apps has never been more important. Emily and Dan discuss a controversial answer to this problem, that kids do not deserve the right to privacy, where they each land on the issue, and how exchanging privacy builds trust. They then discuss how to establish ways for kids to practice privacy.  Ultimately being clear, setting expectations and guidelines around the devices is the best way to create tech boundaries. Dan wraps up by offering great mindset shifts around how we approach phones, both in terms of their immense power and possibilities and the destruction they can cause.Episode Outline:(03:18) Modern kid phone problems(08:27) What gets measured gets managed(18:15) Internet safety and the right to privacy(22:09) Installing tech boundaries, expectations, and guidelines(28:05) Is it the parents or the tech company’s job to keep kids safe?(39:18) Building skills to interact digitally (40:54) Pros and cons of the current generation’s technology(46:10) Do this before giving a kid a device(51:00) First season wrap upConnect with Dan and Emily: Great Job! WebsiteGreat Job! Twitter Great Job! Facebook Great Job! LinkedIn About Dan and Emily: We’re Dan and Emily Mall, the parents behind Great Job! We’ve known each other since 5th grade, been together for over twenty years, and have spent the last 12 years raising our two daughters, Sidda and Charlie. We started this space after we noticed a lot of our friends and teachers (and our kids’ friends’ parents) coming to us for advice or to compliment the way our kids sometimes show up in the world. We wanted a way to share our stories of what’s worked and hasn’t for parents and caregivers, who, like us, struggle with raising amazing humans.