Q&A: Monitoring the Role of Technology in Children’s Lives
Monitoring the role of technology in our children’s daily lives is becoming more of a priority for parents and educators today. Whether you embrace the digital age or yearn for days of old, it’s clear that technology plays a role in your children’s development and can facilitate both building friendships as well as deterring social interaction. Additionally, children with social issues face unique challenges when dealing with peers. Georgia Bozeday, Ed.D., Director of Educational Services at RNBC, discussed ways we can help our children leverage interests to their advantage in pursuit of establishing friendships.
Q: How can parents help their children manage technology so it doesn’t become isolating?
GB: As a parent, you may feel somewhat relieved when your child has settled into a video game or computer program for hours at a time. After all, the time spent in front of the screen means he/she is safe and is doing something he/she finds enjoyable. However, extended periods of time spent online or playing video games solo, especially for children with social issues, can be harmful. One approach to this dilemma centers around providing your child with a system built on time management.
This suggestion for parents is aimed at helping their kids develop a personal calendar, creating a timeline of after-school activities, including time for their favorite media pastime within a balanced framework. After brainstorming several choices of things to do after-school, including those “non-negotiables” like homework, family time, chores, etc., children use this list to fill in the open slots in their after-school schedule. Their favorite activities can only be slotted after the “required” expectations have been completed. This approach may also help smooth over those situations that occur during transitioning when a child can be upset when asked to stop one activity and start another. A pre-determined schedule can help ease these transition difficulties that a child may experience. This type of plan also reinforces completing certain tasks before other activities and, thus, prioritizes persistence in both academic and social endeavors, like spending time with family.
Q: How can parents help their children use technology or other interests to foster friendships?
GB: A child’s interest in technology (such as video games) or any other activity can be regarded as a vehicle for communicating with peers. This switch in perspective from a personal focus to a social emphasis can be challenging for many kids, especially those with social issues who may gravitate towards technology for comfort and for self-soothing qualities. For those children, their favorite activity may become part of a world all their own. The key as a parent is to set some social goals around participating in the interest, either formally by sitting down and discussing specific behavioral pathways, or by simply helping the child find ways to discover peers with similar interests. It’s often helpful to enlist the aid of teachers, other parents, or after-school club leaders and see if there could be opportunities to talk about individual interests as a means to establish shared interests.
Socially adept children incorporate this perspective switch from personal to social naturally. Kids who have difficulty with social skills and have very specific and well-defined interests often don’t recognize these activities as social bridges. Instead, they lock into their unique, individual way of pursuing their interests.
Here again, parents and teachers can help children in a variety of ways, including developing lists of interest-related conversational topics, practicing initiating a conversation using these opening statements. Another perhaps more unusual idea is to model this kind of social situation by intentionally setting up a social interaction with a friend or relative, constructed in such a way that the children “secretly” observe the interaction, using a pre-determined list of criteria that can even be printed out ahead of the exchange.
After observing for a set time period, the parent or teacher asks the child to “rate” his/her parent or teacher according to the pre-set criteria. Within this context, children can also be encouraged to offer suggestions about ways the adult could have increased the number of reciprocal exchanges within a timed observational period. These kinds of activities that are fun and participatory, and put the child in the role of evaluator and expert, facilitate partnerships between parents/teachers and kids. Additionally, at the same time that parents and teachers are fostering social growth with their children they are building up two-way relationships based on positive shared experiences.