Today, students may feel like they are constantly being followed by a kind of digital-age paparazzi. Parents and friends post their images on Instagram and Snapchat. Learning management systems send alerts to parents about missed assignments and grades. And GPS systems in smartphones and watches allow families to determine their location at all times.
And that can make it difficult for students to get used to solving their own problems and learning from the small failures that are supposed to happen in school, says Devorah Heitner, an author who advises schools on social media issues.
He has spoken to hundreds of children, parents, and educators in schools across the country about the pros and cons of this changing media and technology landscape. And those conversations inform her latest book, “Growing up in public: coming of age in a digital world.”
“I would say I'm really a techno optimist, so I'm not here saying this is all terrible for kids,” she says. “On the other hand, children have sometimes had very stressful experiences with things like remote school or social media. “So I wanted to capture the full breadth of the mixed experience of growing up online, which is neither net positive nor net negative for many children, but somewhat mixed.”
EdSurge connected with Heitner to talk about what he learned and the advice he gives to educators at all levels, from elementary school to college.
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts, or use the player on this page. Or read a partial transcript, edited for clarity, below.
EdSurge: You maintain that children today live in a very different technological and media landscape than their teachers or parents. The level of privacy that children have now is compared to what a child celebrity had a generation ago. And that didn't go well for many child celebrities.
Dévora Heitner: Well, children are much more searchable. People outside their immediate family (their own community) know about them because parents share information about them on social media. And then add facial recognition and other things to that, and there is a huge amount of data available about our children.
You point out that some well-intentioned tools can have unintended consequences for children, including online grade books that notify parents about missed grades and assignments. What do you mean?
My son's high school is obsessed with us reviewing Canvas, which is (the learning management system) they use, and it's where all the assignments are. It is more than an online qualifications portal.
I'm not here to say that LMSs are just bad, but I think disabling access to the grading part sometimes, which Challenge success recommended from Stanford and others have recommended it for mental health reasons. Kids shouldn't be able to check their grades in the middle of the night. Kids shouldn't be able to do it during the school day, if you're sitting in one class and can get your grades in another class.
I just saw a really interesting tweet from a young man in college (complaining about being) at a party and a test grade pops up. And I don't think anyone really thought about that with online ratings. Maybe you should be in AP US History and not get your calculus grade right now. And frankly, I think maybe you should be at the party on Saturday night and not be getting your grades now just because your professor came into the grade on Saturday night, maybe that's not the ideal time for you to get your rating.
So are you worried that they constantly emphasize your position in the points system?
Yes, and it leads parents to feel like they're supposed to monitor their kids, allowing kids to outsource their executive function to their annoying parents. And frankly, I myself am an anxious parent of a new ninth grader who has a tremendous hill to climb like all new high school students do: learning to be in nine classes and take charge of extracurricular activities and a lot of complexity. And no one ever said starting high school was easy. In fact, we know that starting middle school and high school are big transitions for almost all students. Even strong students will often struggle. And we know that in the wake of this pandemic, many kids are having various school-related struggles around things like executive function, but outsourcing it to parents doesn't set them up for success.
The role of a parent should not be to harass a child with every test, every assignment, every project, because that turns parents into police officers at an age of adolescence when children should be further separated in their development, thinking about these things. for themselves, experiencing some of the consequences of more, as I would say, minor failures: not graduating from failure in high school, which in our society is probably too dangerous to allow.
We've all heard complaints about helicopter parents who are too involved, but it seems like today's tools take this to a whole new level. How would you describe it?
Yes, I think parents can read group texts. They may be very involved in their children's social lives in a way that may or may not be healthy for their own mental health. Do you really want to relive high school? It was probably bad enough when you left.
So I think it's really difficult because parents have so much access to track our kids' location, see their grades all the time, and potentially read their texts. And then the question arises: “Is that what a good father does?” 'Do I need to know everything about where my son is and who he talks to all the time?'
And I recognize that there are real dangers, or that your child could be on Discord or social media and meet someone really problematic. So I have that concern. But at the same time, I'm really leaning toward… telling parents that we should guide rather than monitor. And part of the mentoring might be working with your middle schooler who has a new phone user on who they can stay in touch with or deciding which apps are Yes or No. It's not just about handing over the phone and saying, “Nice one.” luck.' But it's also not just about putting an app on your phone to track them and expecting that to parent for us. Tutoring is really about teaching our kids to communicate.
How do I send an email to the teacher? How do you deal with a friend in a group text when things are tense? How do you deal with maybe walking away from a group text message that becomes toxic or inappropriate, or someone asks you for an inappropriate photo or makes a really mean joke, or says something racist or homophobic on social media? What do you do for a living? What to do if your friend puts you on YouTube and didn't ask your permission first? There are so many situations where our kids need help coping, and I think a lot of parents give up and say, “I don't know how to deal with this, good luck.”
We worry too much and want to use software to monitor them, but we don't try to just talk to them. And part of the challenge is that (as children) we got a lot of information from listening to our parents on the phone, a lot of information about how to communicate with empathy, set limits, and deal with conflict. And our kids are watching us gloss over our lives and we're not doing enough to explain to them some of the common communication dilemmas that are likely to arise.
That's why I think modeling is incredibly important, and schools can be places where kids learn how to write an appropriate email or what to do if they have to talk to a teacher. We need to guide children more about communication. Kids are sometimes like deer in the headlights when they get a phone call offering them an internship or a job. They don't always know how to deal with those communications.
Listen to the full interview on the EdSurge podcast.
