The Technological Parent Trap
By Heather Reagan Isbil
Technology easily takes the cake, in regards to some of my trickiest parenting challenges. It’s right up there with infants successfully sleeping through the night and an officially potty trained toddler.
It used to be parents that had to set a geographical boundary and curfew for their children to obey. But in this day and age, “Don’t go past that landmark.” has been replaced with “Don’t go to that website.”
My generation had the last low-tech childhood, and now we are among the first truly high-tech parents. I am standing in the middle of my parents and my children when it comes to technology- one foot dipped in the waters of Instagram, Twitter and Facebook; and the other stuck in a puddle of handwritten letters, camera film, and face-to-face talks. When it comes to parenting, I find this middle place difficult, as my parenting model came before the Internet.
Now, whether we’re carpooling, standing in line, or at the dinner table, without fail, my kids tote their cellphones, tablets, or iPads- much to the horror of my parents. Essentially, as parents, we wonder, just how much technology should be allowed in our lives and those of our kids?
On one hand, resistance seems futile: How can I forbid my children from interacting with today’s amazing gadgetry? This is their brave new world, and they need to know and understand and utilize it. On the other hand, my children are not fully matured yet. I have spent a lot of time with ‘Mommy Guilt’ for allowing them devices and screen time, or for afternoons when I didn’t have it in me to fight their mystifying addiction. The question of managing screen time, what is on the screen, and protection of those in front of the screens is a constant, downright daunting issue that frankly makes me want to go full 1800’s on all of them and throw every last blinking device away.
I try to be reasonable. So my husband and I set limits and negotiate. We monitor, we look over their shoulders, we set parental controls and block content. We worry about their cyber footprints. We beg, implore them not to send naked pictures of themselves to anyone and even worked together to create a ‘Family Media & Tech Agreement’. And, at the end of the day, we pray to the powers of this bizarre tech-savvy universe that our children won’t stumble too hard or fall too far when they inevitably trip into an Internet pothole.
Like it or not, we are in the zenith of the technological age, and it seems that parenting has had to morph just as rapidly as technology. We can try our hardest to push back and carve space into our children’s lives, full of treehouses and puzzles, but in the end, our children will grow up with the world at their fingertips, courtesy of a touch screen, and they will have to learn how to find the balance between their cyber and real worlds. I’m not sure if there is a “right way” to parent with technology. Nevertheless, acknowledging that what we are doing is unprecedented– that no study yet knows exactly what this iChildhood will look like when our children are adults– feels like an exhale of sorts.