Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

11.16.09 | In many ways, Dan Simmons and his wife are doing it right when it comes to their kids and the digital world. They’re not peering over their kids’ shoulders, but they have their backs. 

“I don’t want my daughter to friend my friends, and I shouldn’t be friends with her friends,” says the 44-year old father of three kids age 5 to 14. “I don’t want her to see what I’m talking about with my friends, why should I see what she’s discussing with hers?”

But, that doesn’t mean Simmons could resist temptation when Maddy, 14, checked her Facebook account on his iPhone and then forgot to close the app.

“I was concerned about Facebook for a while,” Simmons says. “But then I saw the stuff [her friends] wrote about, and they’re smart and funny, and it’s pretty innocent.”

For Simmons, a small business owner from Evanston, Ill., technology isn’t scary. His business has been using computers for more than 20 years. As a parent, his style is not to look over his children’s shoulder. Yet, his understanding of computers has also afforded him a degree of control over what his daughter can and can’t do.

“I set up her computer and I have administrative privileges,” Simmons says. “So, I can turn the faucet on and off when I want to.”

Which doesn’t necessarily sit well with his daughter.

“There isn’t a lot of good communication when it comes to kids, parents and technology. The most annoying thing they do is when they put parental controls on my computer,” Maddy says. “If they would give me a little bit more of a leash, I could prove to them that I’m trustworthy.”

As University of California-Irvine professor Heather Horst found in her study on parents and kids in the digital age, in families with more technological prowess, battles are often over the age-old teen quest for more autonomy, not a driving fear of what lurks in the shadows.

Maddy says she appreciates some guidance from her parents, but they can’t understand the burden created by being connected all the time during one’s adolescence. Things like sexting and the constant sharing of anything that comes to mind have created a whole new level of peer pressure, as well as unforeseen consequences.

“Offline, it’s just usually the same thing as it’s always been: drinking, drugs and sex,” she says. “[But] online pressure is dangerous because people do and say things that they normally wouldn’t do in person, and it’s also risky because people forget that once you put something on the Internet, it’s there forever.”

In that, Maddy sums up one of the more vexing issues facing teens—the new wild west of ethical dilemmas online, which Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Howard Gardner and Carrie James have explored in their recent study. As University of Southern California media studies expert Henry Jenkins says in a video interview, teens today are dealing with issues their parents have never dealt with.

The rules at Simmons’s house are pretty simple, but also flexible. His 5-year-old son and 10-year-old daughter occasionally play Sims or Club Penguin online with their cousins, but generally do so with a parent at their side. Maddy, the only child with her own computer, is allowed two hours a day online during the school week and six on weekends. Anything beyond that requires permission.

Simmons believes that even with administrative privileges, there is no way to completely prevent his kids from being exposed to sexual and inappropriate content when they turn on the computer. 

“They can’t have access to the net and not have access to the creepy stuff,” he says. “You can’t have it both ways.”

Simmons and his wife, Sheila, have explained to Maddy that with remarkable access to people and information comes great responsibility. Thus, they laid down basic safety guidelines about not giving out her full name, staying away from chat rooms and not talking to strangers.

While many worry about what their children might encounter in the digital world, one of Simmons’s greatest technological fears came true this past Halloween.

“Maddy’s phone ran out of batteries [while she was out],” he says. “That was a nightmare.”