Today’s parents and caregivers often find themselves caught between two powerful forces: on the one side, harrowing headlines about how social media harms kids, and on the other, kids’ vigorous lobbying for social media accounts. Not surprisingly, this leaves many adults feeling that they must choose between two terrible options. Should they refuse to give their tween or teen access to social media and, in so doing strain their relationship with their child while likely harming their kid’s peer connections? Or should they allow access to social media and then try to monitor what happens, knowing that their child will, at some point, surely be exposed to toxic content?

I’m glad to say that the situation is actually not so simple and offers some room to work. While there is no solution that lets kids access social technologies while eliminating all downsides, a slow-going, pragmatic approach can help protect kids, adults’ relationships with them, and kids’ connections to their friends. Instead of treating access to social technologies as an all-or-nothing proposition, adults can take a step-wise approach to introducing it.

Step one:  Adults should wait until their child asks for access to social technologies, and then start what will be an ongoing conversation.

The age when kids make this request usually depends on the norms of their community or peer group. When it comes, adults should acknowledge that social technologies can, indeed, play an important role in kids’ social lives. When a child asks for a texting device or social media account, adults can also agree that the time will come when is going to need digital access to stay in meaningful touch with their friends. From there, the conversation can turn to a key question: has that time actually arrived?

So long as a child can remain connected to friends without access to social technology, the potential harms of introducing it outweigh the benefits. But if kids are starting to be left out of social plans because they aren’t reachable digitally, it may be time to consider a change. Social technologies can be bad for kids, but social isolation is bad for them, too.

Step two: Before granting access to social technologies, adults should make a few key rules.

Kids who are asking for access to texting or social media will agree to almost anything to get it. Adults should make the most of their leverage at this moment and set down stringent rules that support healthy technology use. I recommend adults start with this:  no devices go into a child’s bedroom – ideally ever – but certainly not overnight. Keeping tech out of kids’ rooms during the day protects their ability to sleep soundly in that same room at night. And keeping tech out of kids’ rooms at night prevents them from using it when they are supposed to be sleeping. Finally, being allowed to use tech only in the public spaces of the home serves as a constant reminder for kids that there is nothing secret about what any of us does online.

Adults should also feel free to make ban technology at the dinner table, on short car rides, or anywhere else it stands to get in the way of in-person engagement. Again, adults will never have more negotiating power than right when their child first asks for access to social technologies. They should make the most of it. Tech rules can always be relaxed over time, but many adults will find that they don’t need or want to.

Step three: Adults should provide only the minimum access to technology needed to maintain peer relationships.

Most kids can maintain their connections to their friends with texting alone, making it a great place to start. Before kids send their first text, adults should remind them – in no uncertain terms – that their digital activity is public and permanent. Accordingly, adults can make it clear that they will be monitoring their kids’ texts, at least at the outset. As for the texting device that a child uses, it can be configured with the browser disabled and so that apps can be added only with adult permission.

When adults are ready to offer texting to their kids, they should consider saying, “For now, texting should be enough to keep you in good touch with your friends. If you handle it well, we can talk about using a social media app down the line. And if you run into a challenge with texting – kids being mean, or to a group text that gets out of control – I’m here to help. Feel free to tell your friends to watch their words because I look at your texts or, if you need to, that I’m the one making you drop out of an off-the-rails group text.”

If kids are managing texting well, they can be allowed to text with less and less supervision over time. But if they find themselves caught up in ugly text-based interactions, close supervision or a break from digital access altogether may be in order.

Step four: Adults can allow increased access to social technologies on an as-needed basis – and only once there is a good track record with texting.

The day will come when kids make the compelling case that staying connected to their peer group depends on using a social media platform. Hopefully, having had access to texting will have delayed this moment until teens are at least fourteen years old. Why fourteen? In terms of neurological development, this is the age when the ability to think abstractly improves dramatically, and it means that they are much better able to be critical about what is put in front of them. Given that teens, once they start using social media, will inevitably be exposed to problematic content, it’s best to wait until they are cognitively able to regard that content with perspective and skepticism.

Access to a social media platform should only be given to a teen who has already demonstrated good judgment with texting. Further, before allowing social media use, we should remind teens to only post content that they would want their grandparents, rabbi, or a college admissions officer to see. And they should understand that if they encounter disturbing or worrisome content online, it’s their responsibility to alert a trusted adult.

Step five: Adults should stay close.

Social media is, without question, a digital Wild West. Adults will surely feel more comfortable allowing teenagers to explore it on the grounds that they are not using technology behind closed doors, when they have showed themselves to be trustworthy and responsible with texting, and when they have the cognitive maturity to question what they find online.

Adults who do decide to give their teen access to social media should offer themselves as partners in supporting teens healthy use of it. Keeping the lines of communication open around this requires being curious about what teens like about socializing online before asking them what they dislike. Teens who feel that they can talk freely about the full scope of their digital experiences are more likely to welcome adult support on minimizing the downsides of time spent online, which may include new rules and limits.

Finally, we should bear in mind that teens are far more influenced by what adults do than by what we say. Modeling the same healthy technology habits we want kids to adopt goes a long way toward helping them have a positive experience online.

 

 

Dr. Lisa Damour is the author of three New York Times best sellers: Untangled, Under Pressure, and The Emotional Lives of Teenagers, which have been translated into twenty-three languages. She co-hosts the Ask Lisa podcast, works in collaboration with UNICEF, and is recognized as a thought leader by the American Psychological Association. Dr. Damour is a regular contributor to The New York Times and CBS News and the creator of Untangling 10to20, a digital library of premium content to support teens and those who care for them.

 

 

With so much going on in the kids’ tech policy world, including a mention during the State of the Union address, we are back with thoughts on recent developments. We also have several events to share, so please read on.

The legislative and regulatory landscape addressing children’s experiences in digital environments can feel vast, with the FTC, Congress, and state legislatures across the country wrestling with a variety of ways to approach these challenging issues.

The academic community continues to develop our understanding of the impact of the online world via high-quality longitudinal research with children of diverse backgrounds, including projects funded by the CAMRA Act, which passed last year. The research is critically needed but also takes time, and can lag behind the pace of tech platforms and how young people use them.

At the same time, policymakers across the country have been raising important questions about these impacts. How can we best support our children’s healthy development in such a rapidly evolving landscape?

As mentioned in our previous newsletter, one key piece of proposed legislation is the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which broadly focuses on improving privacy and safety settings for kids online, and has ignited a lively conversation  among privacy experts, kids’ experts, civil society, tech companies, gaming companies, and hundreds of families and advocacy groups.

In the Senate, the bill has secured more than 60 co-sponsors, enough to pass should it come to a floor vote. Democrats and Republicans are both well-represented in a true bipartisan effort that is rarely seen in tech policy. If passed, KOSA would represent the first child protection and privacy bill to pass in decades.

We appreciate that this process and the work happening across government has encouraged so many to think about what kind of digital world we want for our kids and the possible ways to shape it through law.

In comments we recently submitted in response to the FTC’s proposed updates to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), we highlighted the importance of not only laying a strong foundation for protecting kids and empowering parents online, but also driving a movement where companies consider the unique needs of kids from the outset of product design.

As the work continues to find a way forward, we urge policymakers to consider an approach that puts children at the center of digital design that is evidence-based and considers how to balance keeping kids safe while enabling their growth and healthy development, which includes enabling them to explore, play, and connect in meaningful ways.

Smart government policies can have a significant role in setting standards, applying pressures and creating incentives for actors to develop a digital world where children are not only safe but can also thrive.

We’ll continue to follow these developments and encourage you to do the same. In the meantime, we’ll continue our work to better understand what well-being in a digital world looks like for kids, how to achieve it, and to help designers apply those learnings to their work.

art government policies can have a significant role in setting standards, applying pressures and creating incentives for actors to develop a digital world where children are not only safe but can also thrive.

We’ll continue to follow these developments and encourage you to do the same. In the meantime, we’ll continue our work to better understand what well-being in a digital world looks like for kids, how to achieve it, and to help designers apply those learnings to their work.

According to NAEP only 14% of U.S. students reported reading for fun almost every day in 2023 – 13 percentage points lower than 2012 – and average reading scores have declined for most sub-groups of 8th graders since 2020. Tackling this crisis in reading requires a multi-pronged approach to understand and address the challenges. The Advanced Education Research & Development Fund (AERDF) initiative Reading Reimagined has embarked on this work, in particular through funding research on how older children (ages 9-13) can build their fundamental skills and overcome the decoding threshold.

At the same time, it is critical to consider the whole child and the way that emotions and past experiences with reading could potentially impact children’s motivation to continue trying to learn and improve.

“Traditional research and development has too long omitted our students. Our approach to Inclusive R&D includes them as critical partners. As we build tech-enabled literacy tools for students of all ages, we aim to include kids in every step of the journey. Cooney has been a foundational partner to help us understand how to best do that and leverage their opinions and expertise.”
—Rebecca Kockler, Executive Director of Reading Reimagined

With the Cooney Center Sandbox initiative, we use evidence-based cooperative inquiry approaches to work with youth directly on edtech product ideation to gather their input and feedback.¹ As one of our participants, Ella, age 10, stated on why designers need to talk to kids, “The adults don’t have kid minds. They might think they do…They are just saying, like, I’m a child at heart, so I can do this.”

In partnership with Reading Reimagined and a group of tweens, the Cooney Center engaged in design activities to answer questions such as, “What should the product experience be so that tweens find it motivating, confidence-building, and interesting? What features should it include? What would make it more/less frustrating?” We organized co-design sessions with 11 children ages 9-13 from diverse geographic locations and backgrounds (five Black, three white, two Latinx, and one Asian). They had been identified as reluctant readers by their parents who provided notes such as:

• “She loves to be read to but struggles with reading on her own. Her reading level is below her grade level but her cognitive level is high making it very difficult to find engaging books at the reading level [and] making her frustrated.” (Parent of Ella, F, age 10)
• “He does not enjoy reading and feels like he is behind his other classmates, which impacts his anxiety and eagerness to read.” (Parent of Alex, M, age 11)
• “When reading, she can sound out words and reads most words, but towards the end of the sentence she loses fluency. Other times she rushes through the reading and skips words. She prefers comic-style books.” (Parent of Zara, F, age 9)
• “He resists reading at all costs. I remember when he was little, other kids would go to bed reading, and he would go to bed reading books of basketball statistics. (He loves math and numbers.) Part of this is a lack of desire to sit still, and part of it is that no one has given him a satisfactory reason to believe that reading is valuable. Especially now, with Chat GPT, he seems to think he will never have to read or write on his own.” (Parent of Mason, M, age 13)

Four adult researchers met with the youth online over two evenings with each session structured around two co-design activities honed for online use.²

The design activities asked children to create digital scrapbooks about what’s “fun” or “boring,” and how those activities intersect with reading. Children also analyzed existing reading apps for “likes, dislikes and design ideas” before embarking on creating their own visions for a reading app that included interesting storylines, reward mechanisms, and features that would engage and support kids who don’t like to read.

Barriers to reading and design themes that kids want to see

The co-design methods created space for thoughtful conversations, through which the children shared many challenges and barriers to reading, including having to sit still and focus, experiencing stress during reading, and frustration with the choices they’re provided and the time investment that reading requires.

• “I’m a pretty slow reader, so I don’t feel like the time that I put into it is equal to what I’m going to get out.” – Mason, 13
• “If you’re a slow reader, there should be a button to make it [scrolling text] slow so you’re not stressed out.” – Alex, 11

In terms of boosting children’s motivation for reading, kids shared several elements that they would like to see, including dynamic, interesting content. Some wanted stories with adventure or that incorporated surprising, random, or weird elements. Older learners also want ways to “swap out” content that is not interesting to them. Another area of discussion was how music can be motivating and make it easier to focus. Having options for focus supports may also provide learners with the agency to use what works best for them.

A major theme of our conversations was the stress and anxiety that reading can cause, from feeling overwhelmed by “big words,” the amount of text, or feeling behind classmates. The kids felt it was important for an intervention or app to break the tension they feel around reading – this could be by providing calming options or providing relief through humor. As mentioned, music can be a way to support focus, mood, and mindfulness.

The children also had ideas about how to create more inclusive digital spaces for them and their peers. When discussing avatars, they noted that there should be non-binary gender options. One child also noted that she wanted a game to be “dyslexia-friendly,” explaining that, for example, the instructions for the game can be read aloud so that everyone is on the same page about how it works and can enjoy the experience more. Other participants who did not mention that they had dyslexia also endorsed “read-aloud” options that would help to address stress, anxiety, or other learner variability.³

Overall, the children are looking for engaging experiences that are inclusive, adjustable, and address social-emotional as well as academic needs. The Reading Reimagined team at AERDF is using this feedback to create design specifications for a forthcoming educational technology to support older students’ literacy.

 

Learn more about project highlights here.

 

¹ Druin, A. (2002). The role of children in the design of new technology. Behaviour and Information Technology, 21(1), 1-25.

²Fails, J. A., kumar Ratakonda, D., Koren, N., Elsayed-Ali, S., Bonsignore, E., & Yip, J. (2022). Pushing boundaries of co-design by going online: Lessons learned and reflections from three perspectives. International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction, 33, 100476.

³ Tare, M., Shell, A. R., & Jackson, S. R. (2022). Student engagement with evidence-based supports for literacy on a digital platform. Journal of Research on Technology in Education, 54(2), 177-187.