International speaker and author on digital citizenship and cyber traps, Fredrick Lane, gave a community presentation to parents and students at the Haines School this week.
Lane, a New York City resident, came to Alaska as part of a small speaking tour. In speeches catered to different grades, Lane tried to create awareness and advocate for control in an increasingly digitized age.
According to Lane, there are an estimated 306 million cellphone users in the United States, which is 95 percent of the population.
Lane said the main takeaway he wanted students to learn was to understand and think about what they’re doing online, and to try to be a good person. An important aspect of understanding is to make sure adolescents make conscious decisions instead of reflexive motions in their social media use, Lane said.
“Control is a form of power, and they’re giving up power when they let out information into the world,” Lane said.
But it’s not just kids that habitually overshare on social media. Many parents create a digital footprint for a child before they’re even born by posting sonogram photos, Lane said.
He met with parents on Monday night to alert them of health risks and implications of too much screen time, and imparted tips on mitigation. Health risks ranged from insomnia to muscle deformity to exposure to sexual content at a young age. “I think it was a little daunting,” Lane later told CVN.
Ironically, Lane said, the antidote to overstimulated communication is also communication—but face-to-face communication. Talking about your values with your child, and teaching them empathy that they can’t get through a screen are the keys to healthy parenting.
“It’s absolutely the modeling that we are all doing as parents in what the kids expect to do,” Lane said. According to Lane, part of the problem is that parents feel they need to be ahead of kids technologically, which isn’t necessarily true.
“What I think they do need to do is to communicate enough with their kids so the kids know how their parents expect them to behave,” Lane said.
Technology doesn’t cause misbehavior, he said, it facilitates it.
Carlos Jimenez, who attended the presentation with his wife, said that he thought Lane’s talk was great, and that all the parents gained a few more tools to mitigate negative influences. “It was also a reassurance that it’s not in my mind that (everyone in) the world is on screens,” he said