December 8, 2025 • 14 mins
Dr. Devorah Heitner’s book, GROWING UP IN PUBLIC: Coming of Age in a Digital World, is designed to help caregivers, educators, and kids navigate growing up in a world where nearly every moment of their lives can be shared and compared. Dr. Devorah Heitner’s writing on kids and technology has appeared in the New York Times, The Washington Post, Fast Company and others. She earned a PhD in Media/Technology and Society from Northwestern University.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Get Connected with Nina Del Rio, a weekly
conversation about fitness, health and happenings in our community on
one oh six point seven light FM.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Good morning, and thanks for listening to Get Connected. Unless
you are the child of a celebrity, your kid is
likely more famous than you are already Internet famous bits
of their lives are posted online every day, and your
kid is now growing up with far less privacy and
control over their public image. Parents too, are tracking and
following and judging their kids world via devices in a
(00:33):
way that didn't exist before. Our guest is doctor Devora
Heidner with her new book Growing Up in Public, Coming
of Age in a Digital World, where she shares research
backed advice about caregiving in the digital age. Doctor Devaa Heidner,
thank you for being on the show.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
Doctor Heidner's writing on kids and technology has appeared in
The New York Times, The Washington Post, Fast Company, and others.
Her previous book, screen Wise, Helping Kids Thrive and Survive
in their Digital world world, was an Amazon bestseller. So
you wrote that book and parents are still worried. They're
worried about their kids. What they're doing, they're showing their
sing where they're going? What are you bringing to the
(01:10):
table with this book?
Speaker 4 (01:13):
So this book is really about the ways kids are
growing up surveilled. Right, Their friends can share a video
of them and get them into big trouble and take
something they said potentially out of context. Their schools are
tracking them. They can get in trouble for something they
say on the school network, and their parents are tracking them.
So our kids are under the microscope. And I think
(01:34):
a lot of parents recognize that sort of peer sharing
danger or that their kid may share something themselves frankly
that nukes their reputation and may be less aware of
the ways that they as parents, as we I include myself,
we as parents can be potentially a privacy threat to
our own kids or a reputation threat.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
What is it like for a kid to see their
worlds judged in real time by not just parents and friends,
but teachers too.
Speaker 4 (02:01):
I think it's really depersonalizing, right. So, like say you're
looking at yourself in the eyes of an app like
Naviance for College Admissions, and you're seeing yourself as a
dot on a graph. And imagine if you are in
your workplace and your performance was being charted on a
public graph that other people at work have access to.
I mean, that's a lot of information, and I think
(02:23):
it's it's very depersonalizing. It's like nobody's telling your individual story.
They're seeing you, you know, as a data point.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
There's also this interesting thing I think, you know, for
adult social media, being connected to our phones. Even if
you're looking at a cat video and you're laughing, it
doesn't necessarily feel great. I think so many adults we
feel guilty about it. How does a fourteen year old feel, though,
How do they relate to their phones?
Speaker 4 (02:46):
I mean, for a fourteen year old, their phone is
an extension of their body, honestly in many ways, and they.
Speaker 3 (02:50):
Do feel a little lost without it.
Speaker 4 (02:52):
It is how they deal with, you know, reminding themselves
to do things. They're setting alarms for themselves. I talked
to a kid yesterday who his phone's starts insulting him
if he doesn't, you know, change what he's doing. If
if his timer goes off, he has it like set
to this aggressive mode some app that's like saying like
you jerk or whatever, like maybe saltier language than that
to provoke him to doing things. And other kids talked
(03:14):
about using rewards like the bakery app or the forest
app that kind of use more like the carrot rather
than the stick, to kind of get you to do
what you want. So they're using their phones to motivate themselves.
They're using their phones to navigate boredom. They're using their
phones when they feel awkward socially so they don't have
to look at each other in the face all the time.
(03:36):
So their phones become incredibly, incredibly important to them.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
There's also something much different for them too, which in
a way is lovely. I think kids are more likely
to share details about their sexual orientation or their questioning
of it, or their mental health or their neurodiversity. For adults,
you know, I think we see a longer. We can
see the future maybe, or we see where that goes.
Your thoughts about you know, what that'sh means to them
(04:01):
and what we should be telling them about that.
Speaker 4 (04:04):
Well, I think we grew up with a huge level
of stigma around even seeking help for any kind of
mental health. Like when I was a teenager, I saw
a therapist for depression, but I didn't tell anyone that
I saw a therapist, and nobody said, Devora, don't tell anyone,
you're in therapy. I just picked it up from the culture.
I just picked up that this wasn't.
Speaker 3 (04:24):
Something we talk about, you know.
Speaker 4 (04:27):
It's I was lucky to have that resource, but it
just I just would say to my friends that I
had to go to work or I had to go
I did not say I have therapy. And now the
fact that kids could disclose something like I'm in treatment
for mental health, or I identify as LGBTQ plus, or
I'm neurodiverse, I have ADHD, or I'm on the spectrum,
(04:47):
these are things we were all again not even actively
discouraged from sharing. It was just the culture, right. It
was like nobody even said, oh, don't come out in
high school if you identify as gay. Right, it was
like not even on the menu in the same way
for many kids. And I think some kids did come
out in my high school. I started high school in
nineteen eighty nine. There were some kids who came out,
but it was much more unusual in that era than
(05:09):
it is now. And the fact that kids are sharing
on the internet about these aspects of their identity makes
parents very nervous because we grew up with all the
stigma and we were worried our kids won't get a
job or that they'll face a media harassment. But what
we have to understand is our kids are actually changing
the culture. Our kids are making the culture better through
all this disclosure. Nobody's obligated to make these disclosures, So
(05:30):
I want to be clear, Like, if your kids in therapy,
they don't have to tell anybody. I still think it's totally,
absolutely their right to keep that private. But I'm glad
to live in a world where you could say to
your friends that you're in therapy, or that you could
come out as gay or lesbian or bisexual, transgender to
your friends, right, I'm glad to live in that world
where that's also on the table, or you could let
(05:51):
your friends know that you have ADHD and that that
possibility changes the ways those all those very different identity
categories are considered, so that hopefully we'll see less harassment,
less workplace discrimination because so many people will be out
in these ways. I mean, I think you can also
say to yourself, I say, if your kid you know,
(06:13):
identifies in one of these identity categories that you're worried
about discrimination, would you want them to have a job
where they.
Speaker 3 (06:18):
Wouldn't be welcome, or would you.
Speaker 4 (06:19):
Want them to go work for an employer who's affirming.
So that's even like another level of thinking.
Speaker 3 (06:24):
About that question.
Speaker 4 (06:25):
But I think it's really tough for adults to even
really wrap our minds around the wave kids are changing
the culture about disclosure. It's so different than what we
grew up with.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
Our guest is doctor Devora Heidner, author of the book
Growing Up in Public, Coming of Age in a Digital World,
helping caregivers, educators, and kids navigate growing up in a
world where nearly every moment of their lives can be
shared and compared. You're listening to get Connected on one
oh six point seven light FM. I'm in a del rio,
And what you were just saying, doctor Heidner, is one
(06:55):
of the things I really like about this book. It
sort of helps adults maybe understand the world that kids
are living in. At your workshops for elementary and middle schools,
I love this example. You ask kids to step into
a circle if a friend has shared an embarrassing photo
of them online, and a few kids might step in,
But when you ask them to step in if a
parent has shared something embarrassing, just about every kid steps
(07:17):
in and just being aware at some point in your
life that parents have been posting images of you doing
things as a kid can be a shock sharing things
about your kid's life. What should parents know? What should
parents ask themselves and their kids about posting?
Speaker 4 (07:36):
I think it consent is so important when we're talking
about sharing about our kids. So obviously, if you have
a baby or a toddler, you need to use your
own best judgment and think about into the future. Will
my kid, as a self conscious thirteen year old or
fifteen year old be upset with me for sharing this
particular image of them as a toddler or as a
preschooler as they get older. Consent is a wonderful way
(07:57):
to teach kids that it's okay to have boundaries, that
they can say no to having their photo shared. And truly,
you're preparing them four times when they're with friends, and
they will know to ask, hey, is it okay if
I post this picture of us at the beach or
at the mall, or even a situation where someone might
ask them for a more explicit photo, and they're going
to be more prepared and grounded to say, heck, no,
(08:20):
I don't want to share a picture of you of
myself with no clothes with you, because they feel confident
that it's okay to say no to sharing a picture
and that no one has a right to share their
picture without their consent.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
I'm going to talk about checking your kid's browsing history
for a moment with an anecdote of my own. So
sixty one percent of parents say they check their teen's
website browsing history, about half look into their phone call logs,
and about half have access to their teen's email account. Interestingly,
not all of those parents tell their kids they're monitoring them.
(08:55):
When I was about fourteen, my mother read my diary
You made a bunch of excuses, and she said she
was sorry, and then she read some things back to
me that she had completely misinterpreted. It bugged me then,
and it still obviously bugs me because I'm bringing it
up a million years later. How do kids feel about
being monitored and misinterpreted? And what about not telling your
(09:16):
kids you're even looking at their private messages.
Speaker 4 (09:20):
I think covert surveillance, which I kind of jokingly call
in the book, going all n essay on your kids
is not a good strategy, because, first of all, there's
no endgame there. What do you do if you see something?
How do you confront your child with it or help
your child with it if it's a problem, if you
don't let them know you were looking. So Ideally, any
kind of monitoring we do is part of a bigger
(09:41):
strategy of mentoring. So you get your eleven year old
to watch they're texting. Maybe you sit down with them
and look at some of their early texts to make
sure they're getting it right, that they're using good etiquette,
that they're navigating it well. You're not covertly reading all
of their texts, which also exposes you to their friends' communication, which,
by the way, kids cannot stand. One of their big
reasons kids don't want their parents reading their texts is
(10:03):
then their friends also will feel hesitant to communicate with them.
Say my best friend is writing a text to me,
and she thought my husband read all my texts, she
might be much less likely to want to, you know,
tell me everything that's going on with her then and
have a high level of disclosure with me.
Speaker 3 (10:18):
Right.
Speaker 4 (10:19):
So, if your child's friends feel like they you know,
your their mom or dad is reading everything on the
group text, that's going to be you know really a
fact what children will even or other kids or teens
or tweens will want it to say.
Speaker 3 (10:31):
To your kid. So that's a whole set of issues.
Speaker 4 (10:34):
But to come back to disclosing or not, if you
don't tell your kid you're looking, then you can't use
it as a teaching tool. And ideally you're not looking
separately from them if.
Speaker 3 (10:43):
You're looking at all.
Speaker 4 (10:44):
It's like the waves our parents taught us to answer
the phone by hearing us on the phone and being like, hey,
you didn't answer the phone very politely, let me go
over with you again.
Speaker 3 (10:51):
How you can do that?
Speaker 4 (10:52):
That's the level of in the early texting days, you
may want to look at some of the texts with
them again and do it in a way that you're
using it as a tech teaching moment, right because they
are thumbing out those texts silently, so it's not like
you're in a position to overhear what they're saying, but
getting a full transcript of everything they're texting. I mean,
who has time, right, You have a job, you may
have other children, you have a life. You probably don't
(11:14):
have time to read all your kids communication. You don't
want to relive the trauma of middle school again, and
you're going to get those things like your mother did
out of context, including your kid's complaints about you, which
is such an important part of the adolescent process of individuation.
And so I mean I wrote in the book about
walking home with a friend and the first time I
heard a peer say I hate my mother. It wouldn't
(11:36):
have been helpful for her mother or my mother or
to hear that conversation, but it was an important conversation
for us to have in terms of where we were
at developmentally. So kids need that space to talk to
one another without us listening in. At the same time,
I do think kids need some mentoring about how to communicate.
Speaker 3 (11:54):
So how do we.
Speaker 4 (11:54):
Do this without going all ns and our kids. I
think the compromise is that some of the time is
esecially early on, they're sharing some of the communication with
us as part of a learning process.
Speaker 2 (12:05):
We only have a couple of minutes left. I definitely
want to get two mistakes because sometime someone's going to
make a mistake on social media. You do talk about
the strategy of taking away social media backfiring, but when
a mistake happens, something goes public. That's embarrassing, that's not great.
How do you repair that?
Speaker 4 (12:24):
Ideally, kids are repairing in the moment and in the
community where it happens.
Speaker 3 (12:28):
So if it's your school community.
Speaker 4 (12:29):
If it's a specific person, like say you've said something
really mean about a teacher, you're repairing in that relationship.
And ideally it's happening not because you got called out
or got in trouble, but because you feel bad. Sometimes
first you get in trouble and then you feel bad.
But we do need to give kids the opportunity.
Speaker 3 (12:45):
To move forward.
Speaker 4 (12:46):
We don't need to be replaying their mistakes, even if
we still have literally the tape, right, even if we
have the video or the photo later. And so I
also think as a society we need to figure out
what to do with those receipts because sometimes we do
have evidence of a a fifteen year old doing something
you know, pretty problematic.
Speaker 3 (13:02):
It might be saying silly, in which case maybe we
can more easily let it go.
Speaker 4 (13:06):
But what if it's something hateful, right, like using us
slur And those are some of the examples I get
into in the book where I think communities need to
take those things very seriously. But what I don't think
we want to do is focus on running that child
out of town on a rail. I think we need
to focus on the whole community and see that video
or photo as evidence that the community needs to do
(13:27):
a better job educating all of the kids, and that
the safety of the targeted group needs to be the focus,
not just you know, consequences for that one kid. We
need to treat that that video or photo when it
surfaces as the canary in the coal mine and assume
that if one kid is using us slur in a community,
other kids are using it and the targeted community is
hearing it. So how can we support that targeted community?
(13:49):
You know, if it's a homophobic slur, how are we
supporting LGBTQ plus kids. If it's a racist slur, how
are we supporting kids of color? Like, what are we
doing to make those kids feel safe and feel heard
and to learn more about their experience? When we focus
only on the individual perpetrator who got caught, that's a
very disproportionate consequence, and we may be putting that kid
in a really desperate situation where it's hard for them
(14:11):
to move forward. If we're overexposing their mistake it's harder
for them to repair.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
There's so much more in the book Growing Up in Public,
Coming of Age in a Digital World by doctor Devorah Heidner.
Thank you for being on to Get Connected.
Speaker 3 (14:24):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
This has been Get Connected with Nina del Rio on
one oh six point seven light Fm. The views and
opinions of our guests do not necessarily reflect the views
of the station. If you missed any part of our
show or want to share it, visit our website for
downloads and podcasts at one oh six to seven lightfm
dot com. Thanks for listening.
Welcome to Get Connected with Nina Del Rio, a weekly
conversation about fitness, health and happenings in our community on
one oh six point seven light FM.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Good morning, and thanks for listening to Get Connected. Unless
you are the child of a celebrity, your kid is
likely more famous than you are already Internet famous bits
of their lives are posted online every day, and your
kid is now growing up with far less privacy and
control over their public image. Parents too, are tracking and
following and judging their kids world via devices in a
(00:33):
way that didn't exist before. Our guest is doctor Devora
Heidner with her new book Growing Up in Public, Coming
of Age in a Digital World, where she shares research
backed advice about caregiving in the digital age. Doctor Devaa Heidner,
thank you for being on the show.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
Doctor Heidner's writing on kids and technology has appeared in
The New York Times, The Washington Post, Fast Company, and others.
Her previous book, screen Wise, Helping Kids Thrive and Survive
in their Digital world world, was an Amazon bestseller. So
you wrote that book and parents are still worried. They're
worried about their kids. What they're doing, they're showing their
sing where they're going? What are you bringing to the
(01:10):
table with this book?
Speaker 4 (01:13):
So this book is really about the ways kids are
growing up surveilled. Right, Their friends can share a video
of them and get them into big trouble and take
something they said potentially out of context. Their schools are
tracking them. They can get in trouble for something they
say on the school network, and their parents are tracking them.
So our kids are under the microscope. And I think
(01:34):
a lot of parents recognize that sort of peer sharing
danger or that their kid may share something themselves frankly
that nukes their reputation and may be less aware of
the ways that they as parents, as we I include myself,
we as parents can be potentially a privacy threat to
our own kids or a reputation threat.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
What is it like for a kid to see their
worlds judged in real time by not just parents and friends,
but teachers too.
Speaker 4 (02:01):
I think it's really depersonalizing, right. So, like say you're
looking at yourself in the eyes of an app like
Naviance for College Admissions, and you're seeing yourself as a
dot on a graph. And imagine if you are in
your workplace and your performance was being charted on a
public graph that other people at work have access to.
I mean, that's a lot of information, and I think
(02:23):
it's it's very depersonalizing. It's like nobody's telling your individual story.
They're seeing you, you know, as a data point.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
There's also this interesting thing I think, you know, for
adult social media, being connected to our phones. Even if
you're looking at a cat video and you're laughing, it
doesn't necessarily feel great. I think so many adults we
feel guilty about it. How does a fourteen year old feel, though,
How do they relate to their phones?
Speaker 4 (02:46):
I mean, for a fourteen year old, their phone is
an extension of their body, honestly in many ways, and they.
Speaker 3 (02:50):
Do feel a little lost without it.
Speaker 4 (02:52):
It is how they deal with, you know, reminding themselves
to do things. They're setting alarms for themselves. I talked
to a kid yesterday who his phone's starts insulting him
if he doesn't, you know, change what he's doing. If
if his timer goes off, he has it like set
to this aggressive mode some app that's like saying like
you jerk or whatever, like maybe saltier language than that
to provoke him to doing things. And other kids talked
(03:14):
about using rewards like the bakery app or the forest
app that kind of use more like the carrot rather
than the stick, to kind of get you to do
what you want. So they're using their phones to motivate themselves.
They're using their phones to navigate boredom. They're using their
phones when they feel awkward socially so they don't have
to look at each other in the face all the time.
(03:36):
So their phones become incredibly, incredibly important to them.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
There's also something much different for them too, which in
a way is lovely. I think kids are more likely
to share details about their sexual orientation or their questioning
of it, or their mental health or their neurodiversity. For adults,
you know, I think we see a longer. We can
see the future maybe, or we see where that goes.
Your thoughts about you know, what that'sh means to them
(04:01):
and what we should be telling them about that.
Speaker 4 (04:04):
Well, I think we grew up with a huge level
of stigma around even seeking help for any kind of
mental health. Like when I was a teenager, I saw
a therapist for depression, but I didn't tell anyone that
I saw a therapist, and nobody said, Devora, don't tell anyone,
you're in therapy. I just picked it up from the culture.
I just picked up that this wasn't.
Speaker 3 (04:24):
Something we talk about, you know.
Speaker 4 (04:27):
It's I was lucky to have that resource, but it
just I just would say to my friends that I
had to go to work or I had to go
I did not say I have therapy. And now the
fact that kids could disclose something like I'm in treatment
for mental health, or I identify as LGBTQ plus, or
I'm neurodiverse, I have ADHD, or I'm on the spectrum,
(04:47):
these are things we were all again not even actively
discouraged from sharing. It was just the culture, right. It
was like nobody even said, oh, don't come out in
high school if you identify as gay. Right, it was
like not even on the menu in the same way
for many kids. And I think some kids did come
out in my high school. I started high school in
nineteen eighty nine. There were some kids who came out,
but it was much more unusual in that era than
(05:09):
it is now. And the fact that kids are sharing
on the internet about these aspects of their identity makes
parents very nervous because we grew up with all the
stigma and we were worried our kids won't get a
job or that they'll face a media harassment. But what
we have to understand is our kids are actually changing
the culture. Our kids are making the culture better through
all this disclosure. Nobody's obligated to make these disclosures, So
(05:30):
I want to be clear, Like, if your kids in therapy,
they don't have to tell anybody. I still think it's totally,
absolutely their right to keep that private. But I'm glad
to live in a world where you could say to
your friends that you're in therapy, or that you could
come out as gay or lesbian or bisexual, transgender to
your friends, right, I'm glad to live in that world
where that's also on the table, or you could let
(05:51):
your friends know that you have ADHD and that that
possibility changes the ways those all those very different identity
categories are considered, so that hopefully we'll see less harassment,
less workplace discrimination because so many people will be out
in these ways. I mean, I think you can also
say to yourself, I say, if your kid you know,
(06:13):
identifies in one of these identity categories that you're worried
about discrimination, would you want them to have a job
where they.
Speaker 3 (06:18):
Wouldn't be welcome, or would you.
Speaker 4 (06:19):
Want them to go work for an employer who's affirming.
So that's even like another level of thinking.
Speaker 3 (06:24):
About that question.
Speaker 4 (06:25):
But I think it's really tough for adults to even
really wrap our minds around the wave kids are changing
the culture about disclosure. It's so different than what we
grew up with.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
Our guest is doctor Devora Heidner, author of the book
Growing Up in Public, Coming of Age in a Digital World,
helping caregivers, educators, and kids navigate growing up in a
world where nearly every moment of their lives can be
shared and compared. You're listening to get Connected on one
oh six point seven light FM. I'm in a del rio,
And what you were just saying, doctor Heidner, is one
(06:55):
of the things I really like about this book. It
sort of helps adults maybe understand the world that kids
are living in. At your workshops for elementary and middle schools,
I love this example. You ask kids to step into
a circle if a friend has shared an embarrassing photo
of them online, and a few kids might step in,
But when you ask them to step in if a
parent has shared something embarrassing, just about every kid steps
(07:17):
in and just being aware at some point in your
life that parents have been posting images of you doing
things as a kid can be a shock sharing things
about your kid's life. What should parents know? What should
parents ask themselves and their kids about posting?
Speaker 4 (07:36):
I think it consent is so important when we're talking
about sharing about our kids. So obviously, if you have
a baby or a toddler, you need to use your
own best judgment and think about into the future. Will
my kid, as a self conscious thirteen year old or
fifteen year old be upset with me for sharing this
particular image of them as a toddler or as a
preschooler as they get older. Consent is a wonderful way
(07:57):
to teach kids that it's okay to have boundaries, that
they can say no to having their photo shared. And truly,
you're preparing them four times when they're with friends, and
they will know to ask, hey, is it okay if
I post this picture of us at the beach or
at the mall, or even a situation where someone might
ask them for a more explicit photo, and they're going
to be more prepared and grounded to say, heck, no,
(08:20):
I don't want to share a picture of you of
myself with no clothes with you, because they feel confident
that it's okay to say no to sharing a picture
and that no one has a right to share their
picture without their consent.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
I'm going to talk about checking your kid's browsing history
for a moment with an anecdote of my own. So
sixty one percent of parents say they check their teen's
website browsing history, about half look into their phone call logs,
and about half have access to their teen's email account. Interestingly,
not all of those parents tell their kids they're monitoring them.
(08:55):
When I was about fourteen, my mother read my diary
You made a bunch of excuses, and she said she
was sorry, and then she read some things back to
me that she had completely misinterpreted. It bugged me then,
and it still obviously bugs me because I'm bringing it
up a million years later. How do kids feel about
being monitored and misinterpreted? And what about not telling your
(09:16):
kids you're even looking at their private messages.
Speaker 4 (09:20):
I think covert surveillance, which I kind of jokingly call
in the book, going all n essay on your kids
is not a good strategy, because, first of all, there's
no endgame there. What do you do if you see something?
How do you confront your child with it or help
your child with it if it's a problem, if you
don't let them know you were looking. So Ideally, any
kind of monitoring we do is part of a bigger
(09:41):
strategy of mentoring. So you get your eleven year old
to watch they're texting. Maybe you sit down with them
and look at some of their early texts to make
sure they're getting it right, that they're using good etiquette,
that they're navigating it well. You're not covertly reading all
of their texts, which also exposes you to their friends' communication, which,
by the way, kids cannot stand. One of their big
reasons kids don't want their parents reading their texts is
(10:03):
then their friends also will feel hesitant to communicate with them.
Say my best friend is writing a text to me,
and she thought my husband read all my texts, she
might be much less likely to want to, you know,
tell me everything that's going on with her then and
have a high level of disclosure with me.
Speaker 3 (10:18):
Right.
Speaker 4 (10:19):
So, if your child's friends feel like they you know,
your their mom or dad is reading everything on the
group text, that's going to be you know really a
fact what children will even or other kids or teens
or tweens will want it to say.
Speaker 3 (10:31):
To your kid. So that's a whole set of issues.
Speaker 4 (10:34):
But to come back to disclosing or not, if you
don't tell your kid you're looking, then you can't use
it as a teaching tool. And ideally you're not looking
separately from them if.
Speaker 3 (10:43):
You're looking at all.
Speaker 4 (10:44):
It's like the waves our parents taught us to answer
the phone by hearing us on the phone and being like, hey,
you didn't answer the phone very politely, let me go
over with you again.
Speaker 3 (10:51):
How you can do that?
Speaker 4 (10:52):
That's the level of in the early texting days, you
may want to look at some of the texts with
them again and do it in a way that you're
using it as a tech teaching moment, right because they
are thumbing out those texts silently, so it's not like
you're in a position to overhear what they're saying, but
getting a full transcript of everything they're texting. I mean,
who has time, right, You have a job, you may
have other children, you have a life. You probably don't
(11:14):
have time to read all your kids communication. You don't
want to relive the trauma of middle school again, and
you're going to get those things like your mother did
out of context, including your kid's complaints about you, which
is such an important part of the adolescent process of individuation.
And so I mean I wrote in the book about
walking home with a friend and the first time I
heard a peer say I hate my mother. It wouldn't
(11:36):
have been helpful for her mother or my mother or
to hear that conversation, but it was an important conversation
for us to have in terms of where we were
at developmentally. So kids need that space to talk to
one another without us listening in. At the same time,
I do think kids need some mentoring about how to communicate.
Speaker 3 (11:54):
So how do we.
Speaker 4 (11:54):
Do this without going all ns and our kids. I
think the compromise is that some of the time is
esecially early on, they're sharing some of the communication with
us as part of a learning process.
Speaker 2 (12:05):
We only have a couple of minutes left. I definitely
want to get two mistakes because sometime someone's going to
make a mistake on social media. You do talk about
the strategy of taking away social media backfiring, but when
a mistake happens, something goes public. That's embarrassing, that's not great.
How do you repair that?
Speaker 4 (12:24):
Ideally, kids are repairing in the moment and in the
community where it happens.
Speaker 3 (12:28):
So if it's your school community.
Speaker 4 (12:29):
If it's a specific person, like say you've said something
really mean about a teacher, you're repairing in that relationship.
And ideally it's happening not because you got called out
or got in trouble, but because you feel bad. Sometimes
first you get in trouble and then you feel bad.
But we do need to give kids the opportunity.
Speaker 3 (12:45):
To move forward.
Speaker 4 (12:46):
We don't need to be replaying their mistakes, even if
we still have literally the tape, right, even if we
have the video or the photo later. And so I
also think as a society we need to figure out
what to do with those receipts because sometimes we do
have evidence of a a fifteen year old doing something
you know, pretty problematic.
Speaker 3 (13:02):
It might be saying silly, in which case maybe we
can more easily let it go.
Speaker 4 (13:06):
But what if it's something hateful, right, like using us
slur And those are some of the examples I get
into in the book where I think communities need to
take those things very seriously. But what I don't think
we want to do is focus on running that child
out of town on a rail. I think we need
to focus on the whole community and see that video
or photo as evidence that the community needs to do
(13:27):
a better job educating all of the kids, and that
the safety of the targeted group needs to be the focus,
not just you know, consequences for that one kid. We
need to treat that that video or photo when it
surfaces as the canary in the coal mine and assume
that if one kid is using us slur in a community,
other kids are using it and the targeted community is
hearing it. So how can we support that targeted community?
(13:49):
You know, if it's a homophobic slur, how are we
supporting LGBTQ plus kids. If it's a racist slur, how
are we supporting kids of color? Like, what are we
doing to make those kids feel safe and feel heard
and to learn more about their experience? When we focus
only on the individual perpetrator who got caught, that's a
very disproportionate consequence, and we may be putting that kid
in a really desperate situation where it's hard for them
(14:11):
to move forward. If we're overexposing their mistake it's harder
for them to repair.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
There's so much more in the book Growing Up in Public,
Coming of Age in a Digital World by doctor Devorah Heidner.
Thank you for being on to Get Connected.
Speaker 3 (14:24):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
This has been Get Connected with Nina del Rio on
one oh six point seven light Fm. The views and
opinions of our guests do not necessarily reflect the views
of the station. If you missed any part of our
show or want to share it, visit our website for
downloads and podcasts at one oh six to seven lightfm
dot com. Thanks for listening.
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