PARENTING IN A DIGITAL AGE
Thanks to Mike Saunders and Tamryn Coats, Digital Lab & Tomorrow Today for this brilliant article and resource.
I have spent most of my career trying to help businesses succeed in a digital world. I believe that the digital world is intimately woven into the fabric of society, and that people are digital citizens as well as physical citizens. This has fundamentally changed the world in which we live.
Lately I have become very aware that digital citizens are not only consumers and employees – they are also our children. Our children are being raised unsupervised in a digital world, and parents are ill equipped to protect them. Most of us are ill equipped simply because this is something we didn’t have to face ourselves as youths.
So the pertinent question is this: How do you protect your child from the dangers of an online world? Linked to this you may be wondering how you can protect them from people you don’t even know and how you can help them when their digital world is so private that you probably wouldn’t even know if there was a problem. I hope this simple document will offer you some answers and help empower you to parent effectively in a digital age. I am not going to share horror stories about what could happen to your children as I believe that you are reading this document because you either have your own stories, or you have heard the stories. My aim is to provide you with a parenting resource.
It must be said at this stage that I am not a school counsellor, a psychologist or a professional in child development. I am however a digital business consultant who has seen a need for parents to ‘skill up’ in a digital age. My experience of the web has given me insights that perhaps are new to you. I have also included a resources section at the end of this document for those parents wishing to delve a bit deeper into the topic. I hope you find what I share to be helpful. – “Mike Saunders and Tamryn Coats”
