Chapter 12

The Parent Puzzle

There are two lasting bequests we can give our children. One is roots. The other is wings.

—Hodding Carter, Jr., noted Mississippi editor

A 1964 New York Times article reflects the nostalgia of the time and reminds us how much (and little) has changed for parents of adolescents. The piece, entitled “And Now He (She) Drives,” recounts the fiery social debate surrounding teenage driving during the liberating 1960s. To put the timing of the article in context, the 10 years between 1958 and 1968 were marked by unprecedented economic prosperity in the United States, stimulated in part by a federal tax reduction in 1963.1 Families found themselves the beneficiaries of greater household income and a new level of affluence that accompanied it. Among the more expensive household possessions on the rise? The family automobile.

With automobiles gracing the driveways of an increasing number of households, parents found themselves in an interesting conundrum: how to protect the safety of immature teenage drivers without robbing the adolescents of social freedom in the process. Consider the commentary captured by the 1964 article from concerned parents of the time. “My personal attitude is that I’d be darned before I’d let my teenager drive a car,” expressed a passionate father who also happened to be an official of the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles.2 “If driving licenses were withheld from anyone who hasn’t graduated from high school, it would be a strong tool to combat dropouts,” hypothesized a concerned high school teacher.3

Safety concerns notwithstanding (teenage drivers were and continue to be among the most accident-prone on the road), parents also worried that the car was costing the teen valuable time away from academic and familial pursuits. A booklet prepared by Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and targeted to teens of the day summed it up quite nicely: “Few of us come right out and say it, but the car can also represent escape—from home, from older people who sometimes seem critical and demanding or even escape from oneself, at times when the going’s rough and problems seem hard to face.” Driving this point home, a study involving 20,000 students in 29 high schools across the United States and Canada commissioned by Allstate Insurance Companies found the following disturbing conclusion about teens and their automobiles in the 1960s: “The first and major point brought out in this study is the detrimental effect of the automobile on teenage grades.” 4

Perhaps the distraction from one’s studies had something to do with the new social community the automobile inspired. Cruising and going to drive-ins became popular teenage pastimes. The car was the gravitational pull that coalesced teenagers—whether uniting them at trendy group hangouts or becoming the destination itself for morally reprehensible activities, like sex and underage drinking. The outcries to protect public morality spawned countless anti-cruising laws in communities across America, many of which remain hotly debated to this day. Concerned parental and governmental authorities responded by literally taking back the highways with curfews that could be monitored and enforced. Teenagers across America bemoaned the protest voiced by so many generations before them—“Parents just don’t understand.”

Everything’s Different, Nothing’s Changed

Does all of this sound strangely familiar? Having the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, we know that the automobile did not create a generation of dropouts. Furthermore, it didn’t produce a generation of the morally compromised. Those free-spirited youth of the sixties are now grown-up, contributing members of society. Still, you can’t blame concerned parents of the time for worrying about the safety and morality of their children. Although we sit in very different times, the worries of protecting adolescents too young to make mature choices and too old to be coddled persist for today’s parents. Only, it’s now cruising of a different flavor—adolescents loitering along the seemingly infinite stops of the virtual highway—that captures headlines.

The real/virtual highway analogy has been liberally used in economic conversation, which draws parallels between how the real roadways stimulated growth in metro areas and the virtual highway created similar growth opportunities without geographic discrimination. But consider the equally provocative similarities that compare parental concerns of yesteryear to today using this same analogy. Just as the car created community among teens through cultural pastimes like cruising and going to drive-ins, the virtual world has done the same with social networks that continue to germinate. Just as the automobile enabled a new environment of permissiveness where teens could experiment away from the watchful eye of their parents, the Internet opens virtual doors that expose today’s youth to potentially objectionable content. Also, just as parents of the 1960s expressed regrets about losing family time because of the newfound freedom of their children, today’s parents long for simpler times when family intimacy remained unchallenged by technology that now competes for the adolescent’s attention.

Despite these similarities, the differences are even more profound. Those sixties parents had something quite powerful that would leave today’s parents drooling. You see, before the 1960s parents even considered offering a teen the keys to the family car, there was one clear requirement that was non-negotiable: the driver’s license. The driver’s license reduced ambiguity and familial tensions in several ways. First, there was a minimum age limit, ostensibly created by officials smart enough to know when the mental maturity of the child was sufficient to operate a vehicle. Second, there was a clear test to measure the extent to which the child understood and could effectively execute the rules of the road. Third, there were classes the child could take to acquire the necessary safety prescription for responsible driving and, simply by doing so, could mitigate the risk of accident. That same 1964 article states, “Findings from over 30 studies indicate that trained drivers have only one-third to one-half as many traffic accidents and violations as the untrained during the critical teenage years.” 5 Finally, parents had more experience behind the wheel of a car and, as such, had legitimate and persistent expertise that earned them a position of knowledge higher than that of the teen.

For today’s parents, the situation could not be more different. There is no virtual driver’s license to assess a teen’s capabilities. No prescribed safe age when society agrees the youth should be allowed on the virtual highway. No required class to ensure that the child is knowledgeable before entering the virtual world. And, perhaps most importantly, there is no guarantee that the parent is more experienced navigating the virtual highway as a digital immigrant than the child is as a digital native. In fact, the opposite is overwhelmingly more the case, as expressed by Rebecca, a mother of two young children in our study:

Rebecca: There’s no way to stop the technology. I mean, from the time that I was a kid to now, is so vastly different that from the time my kids are now in elementary school to the time when they are in high school will again be so vastly different. Will I be able to keep up with what kids can do and access?

Interviewer: Will you?

Rebecca: No.

Whether considering the parental plight created by the automobile in the 1960s or the virtual world of today, the same concern prevails: how to balance the inharmonious tension created by an adolescent’s desire for increasing freedom with the guardian’s primal responsibility of protection. For parents, the role of protection comes with much higher stakes. Perhaps this dilemma explains why parents in our study are the most likely to agree that spending a lot of time and money to protect themselves online means resources well spent.

Social Development: Exposure or Exclusion?

Amanda, a 30-something mother of a preteen boy and one of our study respondents, reflects on the good ol’ days of her youth:

I mean, back in the day, what did we do when we were younger? As soon as we ate breakfast, we were outside all day long. These kids—they seem to want to come in more so they can play the Wii and the Xbox, which I don’t allow that. Usually, I have to kick them out of the house.

Amanda has responded by limiting her child’s access to technological distractions. He doesn’t have a cell phone; no e-mail address; no Facebook account, despite several of his friends having the same. His time on his gaming devices is limited to prescribed weekend hours. Also, in an effort to replenish the family’s social bank account, Amanda has recently disconnected service from the one device that, by her accounts, robbed her family of quality time to the tune of six hours per day—she no longer subscribes to paid television services.

By the looks of it, Amanda appears to be raising a very well-adjusted, well-mannered child. When we ask him what he hopes to see happen with technology in the future, he responds in a meek voice that carries a powerful message: “Better community.” The notion of people helping others using technology as an enabler is a picture of an altruistic society many of us would endorse. But what if the irony in this youngster’s introspective response rests in his exclusion from the community he so craves?

It’s an interesting question and reflective of one of the multiple conflicts parents face in a networked-community age. How permissive should they be with technology in the household? Too much technology, and parents risk raising a disconnected child from the family, or worse yet, according to the worries of at least one of our respondents, an addict. When Susan walked in on her then 10-year-old son a few years ago playing his Nintendo DS in bed way past his bedtime, the result was a young child’s cry for help:

I caught him playing his Nintendo DS in bed at midnight one time. Right then, he started to cry, “I think I’m addicted to video games.” As mad as I was, I didn’t get that angry with him because I could tell on his face there was something wrong. I think I’ve been a little too lenient with the video games and the computer sometimes.

As Susan shares her story with us, her younger son, Frank (now slightly older than his brother was at the time of the episode), overhears and offers his own unsolicited opinion:

I really do think I should stop getting into video games so much. I think I might be getting addicted too. I come home and quickly run to the videogames and then three hours later I’m like, “Oh no, I forgot to do my homework.”

As a response, Susan has limited her sons’ access to technology (although not nearly to the same extent as Amanda). They still play videogames and each has a Facebook account. But Susan limits their access to ensure that she doesn’t unintentionally raise addicts. The resulting social tension for Frank is evident as we probe his friends’ use of Facebook to stay connected:

Interviewer: So how do you feel about the fact that you’re not on Facebook that often and your friends are?

Frank: I don’t feel that good. I really should be on there more. Because most of them [my friends] are like, “I told you that we were going to the community center this Friday. Why didn’t you go on your Facebook wall?”

Interviewer: How does that make you feel when you realize you missed it?

Frank: I feel kind of depressed, angry at myself, frustrated, “Ugh, I just missed a really fun thing.”

Depressed. Angry. Frustrated. Not exactly emotions a parent wants for her child, especially as they pertain to his social development. These types of feelings are now becoming so common among youth like Frank that an April 2011 publication released by the American Academy of Pediatrics dubbed the phenomenon Facebook depression. It’s a condition that occurs when kids compare such metrics as their number of friends and status updates with those of their peers.6 Unfortunately for Susan, there is growing evidence to support the idea that technology addiction among youth is also very real, with research finding children more susceptible to an online gaming habit demonstrating higher levels of aggression, desensitization, and anxiety.7 So, what’s a mother to do—raise a socially depressed outcast or a hopeless addict?

To Trust or Protect?

The root of this very complex psychological paradigm for today’s parents has not changed much from that of parents in the 1960s. It’s an emotional tug-of-war between parents’ desire to trust their children and their fundamental requirement to protect them at the same time. On multiple occasions, we heard parents wrestling with this conundrum and wanting to believe the best in their children:

Amy (a mother of four young boys): I really struggle with wanting my kid to be honest and not have to rely on the technology to confirm that. And that’s one of those lines where I don’t know, I don’t feel like I need to be Big Brother. I want to raise honest kids. I don’t want to have to second-guess what they say to me. Maybe that’s idealistic of a mom of an 8 year old and younger kids.

Vickie (a mother of a teenage girl): I don’t monitor her texts. I know her. She’s really a good kid. She’s a good kid. You know your kid.

Bob (a father of three teenage girls): We’ve raised what for us feels to be very trustworthy children. Of course we have friends who have children who are younger than ours who find out their kids are lying, cheating, stealing, and doing all these crazy things that you’re like, “They did what?”

Rachel (a mother of two adolescents): How much micromanaging should you be doing? I don’t know. A lot depends on your kid. If you have a level of trust and that trust hasn’t been broken, maybe you don’t go that level [of micromanaging].

Susan (our mother of two adolescent boys): I trust them [the kids], which sometimes I question myself if I’m being naive. They’re still young and I want to be able to trust them but kids are kids and hide stuff.

The established parent–child trust relationship is multifaceted and challenging. Just as consumers are a bit leery of companies watching their every potential move, we heard the same concern expressed by parents who feared that this perceived intrusion of privacy could lead to long-term damaging consequences to the trust bond with their child, assuming they attempted the same. But, if parents are blinded by an inflated sense of faith that their child is somehow immune to reckless behaviors online given their self-proclaimed “good kid” label, others may step in to fill the guardian role. For example, in a controversial move, the Australian government has proposed a nationwide online “filter” to protect users, particularly children, from inappropriate content. If implemented, it would be the strictest filtering system of any democracy. The move has provoked critics to question how far the proposed filters could go in limiting one’s free access to information. Just as U.S. public officials in the 1960s attempted to physically take back the roadways from teens carousing into late hours with their reckless behavior, Australia is proposing to virtually block questionable online destinations that may corrupt youth—and limit today’s form of cruising.

As one would expect, free-speech critics have vocalized their protests against such proposed legislation. But surely parents would find such controls welcome—the answer to the virtual driver’s license dilemma. If the government seeks to protect youth by restricting where they can go online, the difficult parental trust question never enters the conversation. After all, parents would have a clear explanation (and could blame the government) for why the child no longer has access to questionable sites or content. At the same time, they would be reassured that such content would be blocked from curious eyes.

You might think that parents would be relieved by a solution like this. But, as we mentioned in Chapter 5 on learned helplessness, U.S. consumers are doubtful the government can meaningfully control the Internet, and the overwhelming majority place accountability for protecting oneself online on the individual. Parents are not excluded from this belief. Consider Jesse, an ex-military father of two young boys:

Interviewer: What about the government—like laws or regulation to police the Internet?

Jesse: I think this is where I’m supposed to—because I served in the army for a while—so I think this is where I’m supposed to say “Yes” to the government. But, no, I wouldn’t trust the government [with the Internet].

Analog Parenting in a Digital World

So where does this leave parents raising hyperconnected children? Does one expose or exclude the child from online social activities? Is it more important to trust one’s children to make the right choices or protect them from dangerous predators? To address these difficult challenges, parents are resorting to outdated methods that have less relevance in a virtual world. Please don’t misunderstand our point. We expect parents to default to wisdom gathered from their own childhood experiences. Unfortunately, these well-intentioned parental techniques, very often the product of recalling how guardians themselves were raised, are ill-equipped and largely irrelevant in a very different digital world. As we mentioned in Chapter 6 on illusion, parents often wrongly correlate truths from the physical world and wrongly assume their veracity in and applicability to a virtual world. These incorrect correlations are expressed in the following three myths that many parents believe.

Myth #1: Boys Are Safer than Girls

The assumption that boys are safer than girls online is just that—an assumption. As we discussed in our Law of Recall chapter (Chapter 7), one of our parents mused that her teenage son, who also happened to be a wrestler, was safer online than her physically weaker teenage daughter by comparison. Although this may be true in a world of sticks and stones, it doesn’t apply online. According to a recent McAfee study, “The Secret Online Lives of Teens,” girls are more likely to engage in social online behavior, which does place them at higher risk for harassment and bullying. But that isn’t to suggest that boys are safer online. Rather than being safer, the study found that boys’ online behavior and potential risk factors were simply different. Boys are more likely to download unauthorized content, particularly unsavory adult material, which places them at different social risks than their female counterparts.8

Myth #2: In a Virtual World, Time Matters

Many of us remember growing up in a day when one had to be home before dark. As we grew older, several of us were given curfews. These physical realities still persist for teens in a real world. There’s something entirely right about wanting one’s child home by a certain hour of the night, when competing alternatives could spell trouble. But there is no protective light of day and no dark shadow of night in the virtual world. Still, parents hold firm to the flawed assumption that somehow children are safer online during bright daytime hours than they are at night:

I’ve caught him [son] with his iTouch at night [on Facebook] so I’ve taken it away. So now we kind of have a rule that the phone and iTouch need to be upstairs at night and they don’t have computers in their room. I just think you’re more vulnerable as a young person at night and parents are sleeping or away.…

Myth #3: Home Is a Safe Zone

This is perhaps the most disconcerting myth of all. After all, we’re supposed to be safe at home. It’s our refuge and the place where we are our most real and vulnerable selves. Yet, the proliferation of connected devices literally opens the home environment to external factors—both harmless and downright seedy. Still, this doesn’t stop parents from believing that somehow their child is safe while in the protected home zone:

Interviewer: What gives you the reassurance here [home] that even though it could be a weirdo [the children play with online] that nothing could happen?

Mom: I mean, they’re playing a game. I mean it’s more removed. It’s not like they can give their information in detail.… I mean they’re playing their game.

Really? Tell that to Lisa Grant, mother to 14-year-old son Zach. While chatting on his Xbox, Zach came across a gentleman who had an offer too irresistible to refuse: Microsoft points for Xbox games. All Zach had to offer up in return was his parent’s e-mail address and password such that the points could be redeemed. After pressuring a suspicious Zach with a threat, “You have like 20 minutes to get me an e-mail address and password. I’m not a hacker,” the youth reluctantly caved. The miscreant wasted no time racking up around $500 in charges to the father’s credit card, which was exposed through the exchange.9 The hacker entered through the virtual door. The home perimeter was violated, and the Grants found themselves the latest victims of identity theft. It all started with an innocent game online.

The Virtual Dashboard

Yesterday’s parental techniques are no match for today’s parental challenges. Unfortunately for parents, outright restricting a child’s access to technology is becoming less feasible, especially as these digital natives explore their own identity and develop social community in a networked-community age. We’ve talked about trust, protection, exposure, and exclusion. But at the center of it all is the need for control. Parents want to control how and when their children are exposed to content and people that could unduly accelerate or arrest the maturation process. In addition, they want control over how to incorporate such knowledge into a parental style that works in their household (permissive or restrictive) and evolves as the child progresses from adolescence to adulthood.

If there is no such thing as a virtual driver’s license for the machine (computer, game console, or mobile device) that the youth knows how to operate better than the parent, then perhaps there is a role for a virtual dashboard. Think of it as a tool that educates and alerts the parent to potentially risky behavior on the part of the child. Many may immediately leap to the conclusion that we already have such tools. After all, parental options for online and television services have existed for some time. But when devices multiply and children mature, maintaining multiple discrete parental controls becomes problematic.

Let’s go back to Jesse for an example of how limited these parental controls remain in today’s environment. When asked if he would consider putting restrictions on a cell phone he has yet to authorize for his preteen son, he replies:

I would. That’s a tough one because they don’t make it where you can really lock it down to where you could have say just your “favorite 5” [contacts] and your parents. If you give them phone and unlimited text, they can go anywhere they want to. You can’t lock the phone down like you can the Internet. If they could, that would make my decision [to get my kids a phone] much easier. You hear it on the news all the time. Phones are real big for taking pictures, sending stuff to people that’s not supposed to be getting it. You can do a whole lot with the phone.

If Jesse had the means to “lock down” the phone to only authorized contacts, his duties as a responsible parent somehow would become more manageable. Although we encountered multiple parents who already extensively use parental blocks online and on television, most had multiple children in the home. How does one manage multiple blocks that are age-appropriate as children mature? How does this become more complex as each child becomes equipped with multiple devices? Technology has a long way to go to effectively bridge the gap. But, when it does, this version of a dashboard could also go a long way in empowering parents with the appropriate level of control for their household and parenting style. Perhaps this helps explain why this service tested among the most compelling among parents in our study.

Even among those who are not parents but are old enough to remember the dangers they faced online as impressionable children, the virtual dashboard has value. Tara, now a much wiser 18 year old, remembers the unsolicited messages she received as a naive young teen on the rage MySpace. Most of the advances came from much older men. When asked about the value of a control center, or dashboard, that put parents in the driver’s seat as it pertains to managing the communications within the household, both she and her 17-year-old boyfriend, Warren, see merit.

Interviewer: How would you feel if parents had a control center where they could see what comes in and out of any device in the house, including phones, TVs, computers—that they had the ability to see or receive alerts on that?

Warren: Sounds good, because by then, I’ll be a parent.

Tara: I think it sounds good.... I’ve heard a lot about phone sex, sexting, where girls take pictures of themselves.

Warren: The real problem with that is that it’s illegal. You can’t send a picture of yourself to someone if you’re under 18.

Tara: That [virtual control center] would probably have the dad stop that from happening. These girls don’t realize these pictures will come back to them down the road.

Warren: Not just come back to them, but the fact that it’s illegal.

There’s a familiar saying, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” Despite the differences between olden times and today, the delicate balancing act of parental control versus childhood freedom remains a challenge for guardians through the ages. We can look back on the 1960s with reassurance that the automobile did not lead to a degenerate society. Perhaps when we have successfully raised another generation of upstanding citizens, others will look back on this time and reflect on our challenges in parenting the first crops of digital natives.

As we contemplate how technology can serve a higher role in empowering parents and protecting children, consider the aspirations expressed by Julie, our mother of young children, as she blue-skies her ideal future scenario:

Interviewer: What do you think the future holds for your kids in terms of technology?

Julie: It’s gonna be surrounding them. It already does more than I was growing up. I think it’s good for them to be able to learn more and maybe come up with better ideas for the future. But they are gonna have to protect themselves. They’re gonna have to have a shield—a web shield. I don’t know how it would be done but somebody probably needs to come up with it.

A “web shield” is a tall order. But practical and transparent tools are within reach and a welcome prescription for today’s protective, permissive, and utterly puzzled parents.