When I was a kid there was MS-Dos, floppy disks, snake, tetris and nerds with big glasses and pimples. Computers was something very few people had and the rest of us could try now and then when we got lucky. Those days are long gone and, being a betweenager, the oldest has gotten her first mobile phone.
Smart phones provide us with meaningful tools to encourage learning, assist doing school homework, communicate with friends and family, play games and relax in front of videos. But they also come with a lot of potential worries for parents as activities are not clear and transparent like when we watch the kids play basketball in the yard. So although I am a big believer in freedom with responsilbility, I found my old head spinning with a variety of questions, such as
- How can we make sure the phone is a safe place to hang out
- How can we encourage activities we support and limit activities we are skeptical towards
- How do we avoid the phone becoming the sole activity and our kid turning into a couch potato
- How can we monitor what is going on, in order to avoid that our kid get exposed to things – or people – that are not healthy for a between-ager
After doing some research on what is out there, what do other parents do etc. I came up with a plan for how to approach all of this:
- First I will need to find out what level she is on. Both in terms of general tech knowledge (how much does she know about apps + the internet, is she capable of/interested in having secrets etc) and online behavior (what will she do online, where does she find information, will she chat to strangers/will she be naive etc)
- Then I want to have some sort of ongoing control over things. Not in order to spy and interfere in her online life, but in order to be able to make positive adjustments to usage and behaviour – and also to be able to make limitations in case there a problems.
I went with Googles Family Link app which is free and provides some OK tools of the sort I was looking for. I installed the parental part on the phones of me and my wife and the childrens version on the smart phone. I then launched a one-week-no-rules period, to silently monitor how things were going and from there decide on what rules to make.
It was quite a week. The daily usage quickly went from 2-3 hours to a whopping 9 hours of screentime!
Youtube´s endless library of useful stuff also contains a ton of braindead 30 second timekiller-movies. It went straight in on a clear first place with +5 hours of time pr day(!), followed by a positive surprise: Pinterest (she is very creative and find a lot of good inspiration there). The next places was taken by games such as Monopoly in the online multiple player version – and WhatsApp, to keep in touch with her friends.
…and as an “added gift” the more time she spent on the phone, the more irritated and poorly behaved she became with the rest of us. Constantly tired, nagging about things she normally wouldn’t care about, talking back when told to do stuff, keeping to herself instead of playing with the siblings etc. etc.
So we found it was necessary to limit the screentime and the content. In other words: It was time to make some rules. We came up with the following, as a compromise between the active outdoor lifestyle we have – and the online life any betweenager also need to have in todays media landscape:
- Max total usage of phone pr day: 3 hours. Max 2 of these on Youtube.
- Goodnight resting time from the time she normally goes to bed, to when she gets up
- New apps must be approved by us before they can be installed
- No social media, except for Pinterest
- No chat and messaging apps, except for WhatsApp (with the “do not allow incoming messages from unknown users” setting ON)
All of this can be administered directly through the parental app. We can also switch the phone on and off when we want, hand out bonus time when we want to etc. The phone can always be used to call us from, even when it is locked – and we can make adjustments to everything at all times.
Besides rules, we try to teach good online behavior: where and how to find high quality information (and what to not believe in), common sense when it comes to talking to strangers etc.
Update: She had the phone for a few months now. There has been a lot of adjusting, limiting and at times we had to completely block the usage when things have been bad (she is also battling with a mental condition). So it is work in progress on this one…… We are currently on max 2 hours screentime pr day.