Parent Trapped

Pornography, Shared Passwords, Incognito Mode, Oh My!

Episode Summary

Since the pandemic started, kids have been spending more time online. So how do we keep them from chatting with strangers, sharing passwords, and discovering adult content? Anya Kamenetz, author of The Art of Screen Time, gives us strategies for making sure your kids are safe and responsible on the internet even when you're not watching.

Episode Notes

Since the pandemic started, kids have been spending more time online. So how do we keep them from chatting with strangers, sharing passwords, and discovering adult content? Anya Kamenetz, author of The Art of Screen Time, gives us strategies for making sure your kids are safe and responsible on the internet even when you're not watching. 

We'll also hear from listener Megan in Austin, who has a tip for getting her kids to open up and talk about who they've been texting. 

Plus, we'll hear from listener Damon in Atlanta about a weekly adventure game that's keeping his three kids busy and curious.

After the show:

And we want to hear your tips and suggestions! Are you reading your kids' text messages? Send your stories to parenttrapped@commonsense.org.

Parent Trapped was brought to you by founding sponsor First Republic Bank. To learn more about their services, visit http://firstrepublic.com.

Episode Transcription

AMB: Megan Irman is a listener from Austin, Texas. 

[0:22] MI: And I'm a mom of two kids. I have an 11 year old son and a nine year old daughter.

AMB: Megan and her husband wanted to keep their kids away from social media and phones until they were in 8th grade. But that all went out the window when the coronavirus hit, schooling became virtual, and all of their kids' interactions with friends went online. Megan couldn't always monitor what her kids were doing – she was working at home and her husband worked outside the house. So unfortunately, the stuff they wanted to avoid by keeping devices away, actually happened.

MI: Some of the things that we've found them doing are chatting in groups and not knowing everyone in that group. And they were just chatting with a stranger. They were sharing passwords and found one of my kids explaining to the other kid what incognito mode meant. 

[1:16] AMB: Megan's referring to the setting where the internet browser doesn't save your history so you can secretly look up anything without having a record of it. Then her kids somehow discovered inappropriate TV shows, and one of her kids was even exposed to pornography.

MI: I think that we've had to pick which risk is more dangerous for our kids. Is it having them be safe in the house on the internet all the time? Or is it having them play outside with friends in the neighborhood and possibly being exposed to the virus? It's our biggest stress, I would say, as parents right now.

AMB: Does that sound familiar? In normal times, keeping kids safe on the internet is an exhausting job. But in corona times that job is constant. And on top of it all, school isn't even online anymore, so we have to keep them safe as we enter what feels like an endless summer. 

[kid screaming]

[2:12] AMB: From Common Sense Media, I'm Ann Marie Baldonado and this is Parent Trapped. 

AMB: Today, we tackle online safety. What are some red flags we should be looking for? How can we get our kids to talk to us if they feel like something's wrong? Is it okay to look at your kids' text messages?

AMB: Anya Kamenetz is here with answers. She's NPR's education correspondent and author of The Art of Screen Time: How Your Family Can Balance Digital Media and Real Life. What's the difference again? Just kidding.  Plus we go on a scavenger hunt because we'll be able to get our kids to turn off their screens, right? 

[music ends]

[3:04] AMB: In the quest for online safety, most of us parents know where to start. We have to tell our kids to avoid communicating with strangers. We have to tell them not to give out personal information, and that people online aren't always who they say they are.  We can set up a defense, with things like parental controls and screen time monitors. But is that enough? 

AK: Any kind of technological solution is going to have a workaround, especially if you have tech savvy kids. They are going to figure out a way to potentially game various systems and so the key thing to remember when it comes to, you know, your kid's safety online is that parental mediation is, in fact, very powerful. 

[3:41] This is Anya Kamenetz, an education correspondent for NPR and host of the podcast Life Kit: Parenting. She has two daughters. One's 8, the other's 3. So she knows how impossible it can seem to keep kids safe online.

AK: You don't have control of your kid's roamings on the Internet, but you do have influence. And influence means that you basically become kind of the voice in their head or the voice over their shoulder when they are making choices and exploring in the online world, as you would hope that they would also do, you know, in the real world. And so, for example, there's a really powerful study that I cite a lot by Erik Rasmussen at Texas Tech that found that a single conversation between a parent and child during middle school years around pornography and sharing the parents' values around pornography was like an inoculation, essentially. 

[4:36] And it influenced their attitudes toward pornography, their use of pornography later on, even in the college years. So – and there's similar research on things like voting or beer commercials, where the parent's attitudes really kind of influence your children's attitudes as they're looking at things online. So I think it's really important to engage with your kids about what they're seeing online and try to do it in an open and honest [inaudible] way. I think that's really the tough part, right, for a lot of parents because the prime mode that we're used to engaging with kids around technology is kind of shut it off, shut it down. You know, what is that trash? But we're going to learn a lot more if we try to kind of open up a conversation that's nonjudgmental.

[5:19] AMB: One thing to keep in mind is in the same way that you can't follow your kids to school or around the playground, you can't be with them every second when they're online. So, what can you do with that? You can help them have the tools to navigate the technology. And you say, you know, one important thing to do is keep communication open – that trying to talk to them is the most important thing and maybe even sort of, you know, play with them and sort of become familiar with what they're doing online. 

AK: That's right. And I should add, you know, that we're talking a lot about stranger danger, but a big danger that comes with kids, and the online world is peer aggression, bullying and just kind of like conversations that might get off the rails because kids don't know the rules for interacting with each other. But I also think it's important for kids to know that, you know, when you have a conversation online, you can't understand people's full emotional situation. It's easier to be mean to each other online because it's kind of easier to walk away. People can't always tell when you're being sarcastic. And so kind of modeling that extra kindness and that extra bit of communicativeness, I think is equally important. And we do that as well, not only by sitting alongside them while they're posting, but also having them sit alongside us when we're posting. So, like I ask my kids, including my three year old, before I put up a photo of them online. 

[6:42] And I want them to kind of see what I'm writing and see what the comments are. And so, ask for their advice, ask what they've been seeing lately, what they've been hearing lately, if they hear a funny video that they would share with us, or meme and kind of just get them to be the mentors to you a little bit, because kids love to have that role reversal.

AMB: Can you talk a little bit about the concept of mentoring versus monitoring? 

AK: Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, when we're using these apps or when we're taking away the phone at night, this is monitoring behavior. This is something that's part of our job as parents to have safety rules. But equally important, when it comes to screen time and just the vast range of developmentally important activities that our kids are doing online, we need to be mentoring them. So that means talking about what is good behavior, what's respectful, also talking about what are the positive benefits of online use. You know, our kids might not automatically know that they can learn about anything that they want to know by doing searches online. 

[7:44] AK: So I'll give you an example. Just the other day, my daughter had a question at lunchtime. She said, why do we need to eat vegetables? Don't fruits give us everything that we need? And I was like, well, I can give you an answer off the top of my head. But what I would love is for you to actually look it up and see if you can come up with an answer. And so she wasn't too keen on the idea but I said, you know, like, don't go back to what you were doing for fun online until you answer this question, because it's a really important skill, you know, to be able to find the answer to a question online. And she did come back and she had good scientific information. And we both learned something. Yeah. You don't need to eat vegetables. You can just do fruit.

AMB: Is that really what you found out? 

[8:22] AK: Basically. I mean, fruit has more sugar, more calories, but I said, you know, but that means you have to eat blueberries every day. Lots of blueberries every day. Because that has all the good stuff. It's in dark greens.

AMB: I am totally not letting my kids listen to this part of the interview. They don't need more reasons to not eat kale. Of course, any conversation about internet safety needs to address the fact that not all information sources are reliable. For ways to find credible sources for kids, check out commonsensemedia dot org. We'll have a link in our show notes. 

AMB: Coming up, the unintended consequences of reading your kids' text messages.  Plus, the joys of searching for dead worms. Yes, that's a left turn, but it will all make sense soon. Back in a moment.

AMB: And we're back. 

[9:52] AMB: Remember Megan from the top of the show? The mother whose kids were chatting with strangers, and dabbling with incognito mode?  She told us that one strategy she used to see if her kids were being safe online came from a tip she got from a coworker. 

MI: His approach with his teenagers was to take their cell phones randomly and periodically and then look through their text messages with them, and sit down with them and just discuss what the text messages were and what might have been inappropriate and why, and use it more as a teaching session than a disciplinary session. And so we have been doing that. And that is how I found out about all of these things with my kids. And they were voluntarily telling me information that I wasn't even seen on their chat. 

[10:41] AMB: So this tip worked for Megan. She read the texts and her kids opened up. But Anya says think about how old your child is before picking up their phone.

 

AK: I think that might be appropriate for a fifth grader. I do not think it's appropriate for a teenager. For teenagers it's really a red flag behavior because we know that there is dating violence and domestic violence among teenagers. And if we normalize the idea that someone who loves you is going to look at your communications, for whatever reasons that they have, I don't think that's a great message to send actually to a teenager. I think you need to be able to build up trust a little bit better. With very young kids, you know, kids where you might be supervising them on a playdate, for example, it's a different story because, you know, you might want to be able to just look in and see what's what's been going on. But I would be really cautious. I think there's a lot better ways to make sure that there's open communication. You know, if there's a problem – sure. If they get in trouble with school or if you're seeing red flags around their mental health, you know, there might be reasons to kind of break emergency glass and take a look at their text messages. But I would take it as seriously as I might with a spouse, you know? If something's really going on with them and I have no idea and they won't tell me, that would be the only time that I would pick up my husband's phone and I would say the same thing with my kids.

[11:55] AMB: You just brought up this idea of red flags. Do you have a way of helping parents help their kids figure out when something is starting to feel inappropriate? I feel like kids can start to feel when something's wrong, but how can parents help them talk about that?

AK: Oh, I think that's such a great question. I think that especially for our girls, right, who are often socialized to be nice and to maybe placate – that we need to really be teaching them how to go with our gut and how to get out of a conversation and not be afraid to offend someone or hurt someone's feelings if it really doesn't feel right. So talking about that, normalizing that, really helping kids understand that, you know, a problem is not a secret, that someone should not tell you not to tell some someone about something if if you feel like that's not the right thing – if it's not something that is, you know, a secret that is a good secret – a surprise. And how do we take it when our kid puts up a boundary? Do we kind of demand that they give us their attention all the time or that they're not allowed to decide when a conversation is over? You know, some people might see that as that's a respect issue and that's something that every family has to work out.

[13:12] AK: But we also think about, you know, if we as a parent are kind of the intrusive parent and overbearing parent that says, look, you're gonna listen to me and if you don't want to tell me something that's too bad, how does that then translate to conversations they might be having online where, you know, they might want to end the conversation and the other person is insisting – no. 

AMB: You've talked about this concept of rehearsing the party line, you know – giving your kids the tools or a script almost a way to get out of interactions online that they don't like or that makes them feel uncomfortable. Can you talk a bit about that? 

AK: Yeah, sure. I mean, you know, we talked a little bit about – do you look at your kid's phone? But I think it can be useful and helpful to give the kid permission to kind of blame it on you if they say, “Oh, gosh, my mom reads my messages and we talk about this right now.” That's a white lie that can get them out of something.

[14:02] AK: I actually – I see this with my daughter because she has a friend that she spends a lot of time with playing ROBLOX on Facetime. And sometimes this friend is a little bit aggressive with her. And I hear her saying all the time, oh, I've got to go. My mom – you know, my mom is making me go into dinner or whatever it is. And it's true. But I think it's also helpful for her that she doesn't have to have an argument about leaving the conversation because this friend is, you know, is totally well-meaning, but she’s the type to be like “why do you have to go? Why can’t you just lie, or whatever?”

AMB: You've talked to experts on this difficult subject of pornography and having kids discover it. One expert you talked to, you said that, you know, if you're not comfortable talking about it with your kids, then maybe you're not ready to give your kid a device and your kid isn't ready to have a device. For a lot of people, I think, the coronavirus introduced devices to their kids earlier than they were originally comfortable with. But I do hear what these experts are saying. And the main point is that you have to talk about it even perhaps earlier than you would like. 

[15:03] AK: Yes, definitely. And the wonderful thing is that we live in the Internet age, where there are so many resources for helping facilitate conversations that we as parents may not be ready to have, whether that's about race or about sex or gender or politics or anything else. So I would really recommend that parents look into, for example, the website ScarlaTeen that's been around for more than a decade now, kind of answering teens' questions – a lot of them about sex and and about porn and sexual media in general, because we also have to remember that it's not just about hardcore pornography. It's about the depictions of women's bodies and of relationships that are in all kinds of media that you can see on Netflix or in advertising. And this is all part of a continuum where there's assumptions and messages about relationships between adults or men and women that are not necessarily what we say when we're talking to our kids about relationships or they're seeing different things than they might hear from us and we need to have that open discussion. 

[16:04] AK: And if it helps, you know, you can definitely have that conversation around a television show that you watch together. If it's somewhere in the PG 13 range and there's situations depicted that you want to, like, open up a dialog about, I would really recommend that. And also, you can do it with advertising. So a really simple and safe for work example that I have is with my daughter, who's eight, and her nine year old friend. We had a conversation about women laughing alone with salad, you know that meme? 

AMB: Yes.

AK: So it's this really silly thing, right? This idea that there's all these pictures in stock photos of women who are laughing and they're eating salad – they're so happy to eat the salad, their salad's making them so happy. But it pokes at so many things. It's like, well, why are women supposed to eat salad? Why are women supposed to be happy? You know, why are women shown doing these things? And why does that sell other things? And so that's how you kind of can get this conversation going in a place that feels more safe. 

[17:02] AK: But it's media literacy and it's media literacy connected to gender, connected to images of women. Obviously, that's not – you know, you're not going to be able to have such a gentle introduction all the time. It might be something where you pull down the browser history with your eleven year old son and you're like, oh my God, what's going on here? There's a lot of different ways to get at it. But knowing that you're going to have to be prepared, maybe do a little homework yourself. 

[17:25] AMB: Do you have any tips for parents who want to have these conversations with kids that are kind of on the younger end of things?

AK: Well, I think one thing that's important to do and kind of a low key way to start the conversation is to make sure that there are books in the house that depict sex in a way that you would like them to learn about it. So I, you know, I bought a copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves. I showed it to my daughter. I said, you know, this has information and has pictures of women's anatomy. It's got everything you might want to know that you might not want to ask me. And it's over here on the shelf. So, you know, for some kids, I do recommend the Amazed Junior series of videos if you want to have a more hands on conversation. These are little short animated videos, they're organized by topic and they can answer almost any question that a 4 through 12 year old has. Amaze is the website and a YouTube channel. So making sure that they know that they have access to the information that they might be seeking in a way that is – that you're nonjudgmental about and that you might not necessarily want to be hovering over their shoulder the whole time, I think it's going to go a long way because if they know they can get that information, they don't necessarily need to go hunting for it online. 

[18:34] AMB: And what are some tips that you give on how to help kids step away from screens and maybe start to learn self-regulation? 

AK: Well, I think that's really the key, and I'm glad that you brought that up. So we can't be our kids' net nannies all the time and eventually they're going to have to develop self-regulation. So on the first note, you know, I think we can enforce kind of a rhythm of our days where we do work really hard to make sure that there's a bedtime and a curfew on the devices and on the Wi-Fi if you need it. I've had parents, you know, unplug the routers at night.

AMB: Yeah, that's a trick I've heard of recently. 

AK: It is. Well, another one that I love – a dad used where he said the kids get their iPads. But I have the charger. And so once the juice is run down for the week, that's it. They don't get another charge till Friday. I like that because it's so simple. It encourages them to budget their time and also to not watch too many videos because that really uses it up. And then, other than that, prompting them to reflect on their own states of mind after they use devices. So, I mean, one example of that is if you have a day where kind of all bets are off and they're on the screen, you know, for nine hours – I'm not judging, it happens – check in with them and let them say, like, well, how do you feel right now? Like, are you feeling a little bit hunched over? Like, are your eyes burning from video chat? Because I know mine are. Can we talk about like – how does it make you feel a little bit zoned out and and and really just having that conversation that kind of prompts them to reflect internally on how that feels. 

[20:03] AMB: Anya Kamenetz is education correspondent for NPR and host of the podcast Life Kit: Parenting. If you haven't checked it out, you definitely should. An updated version of her book, The Art of Screen Time comes out in paperback this month. You can find links to Common Sense Media's guide to parental controls in our show notes. And special thanks to Megan Irman for sharing her story. You guys, I'm totally going to try that take-away-the-charger thing. It's definitely going to cause my kids to revolt.

Damon: All right. So listen. Shh shh shh.

Kid: [shouts]

Damon: Listen. 

AMB: Before we go, we want to leave you with an activity a parent shared with us that might help minimize some screen time this summer. 

[20:49] AMB: Damon Sumner is a dad living in Atlanta with his wife and three kids, aged 10, 5 & 4. 

Kid: Uhh… [burps]

AMB: One of the ways they've been dealing with the monotony of being at home during the pandemic is by getting out and doing a scavenger hunt in their neighborhood every week. 

DS: And it definitely wasn't anything we were really doing before the pandemic. The biggest way we really enjoy it, is just that we create it on our own. We sit at a table. We'll get out a marker, get out some paper. And just the ideas that the kids come up with – that's kind of really the best part. 

Damon: Tell us what we're looking for.

Kid 1: We are looking for 4 pine cones!

 

Kid 2: Rocks!

 

Kid 3: A “lellow” house!

Damon: You're looking for a yellow house. We're also looking for an ant pile and a vowel.   

AMB: After awhile, Damon's family got bored looking for the same old stuff.

[21:41] DS: My youngest girl, she was like, hey, can we look for dead worms? And that just kinda caught me off guard. And I was like, “Tell me more.” I think one day she had saw a dead worm and she was just now intrigued by them. And was like “I wanna find some more of that. I want to investigate that a little bit more.” And then somebody – they wanted to put on the list a certain type of smell – like smoke or like a barbecue. I was like that's pretty interesting – the senses, right?

Damon: We've got a lot of fun and excitement here. So let's get ready for our scavenger hunt. Socks and shoes. Here we go!

DS: I think one pro of having these scavenger hunts weekly is that there is something to look forward to. But again, they don't know specifically what it is going to look like because the list isn't made. So there's a little bit of this suspenseful mystery. I think, as a parent too, sunup to sundown, the kids are like, “what are we doing?” It's just a nice staple to have in your calendar. It's just something like, “hey, this is 90 minutes” — or whatever time you block out — “this is what we're going to do.” And it's kinda helpful just to kind of navigate your schedule, navigate your day. 

[22:52] AMB: Thanks to Damon and his family for telling us about their hunts. Inspired by Damon, I asked my 12 year old and 8 year old for stuff to find.

AMB: If we went on a scavenger hunt in the neighborhood, what are some weird things that we can add to it?

KID: A bird with yellow beak? I don't know. A bird's nest.

KID 2: Like a doodle – goldendoodle or sheepadoodle. I can't think of any more doodles. All those doodles, you know.

[23:35] AMB: Not bad, but I still like dead worms better. 

AMB: Are you still coming up with new ways to spend family time? I still need new ways. Send your parenting hacks and comments to parenttrapped at common sense dot org. Or send us a scream! This week's came from James Mickens.

AMB: This episode was produced by me—Ann Marie Baldonado—with Dennis Funk. Our editor is Hillary Frank. We got production help from Natalie Price. Our engineer is Pete Karam, and our theme song was composed by Casey Holford. We get editorial support from Andrea Silenzi, Fred Graver, Kyra Reppen, Jill Murphy and Ellen Pack.

[24:19] Common Sense Media is a national nonprofit that rates media based on children's developmental guidelines. To learn more visit commonsensemedia dot org where you'll find age-based ratings and reviews that are written by experts and trusted by families everywhere.

Thanks to our show's founding sponsor, First Republic Bank, supporting your financial goals for the long term. To learn more, visit First Republic dot com today.

And be sure you've subscribed to Parent Trapped on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening right now.