June is Internet Safety Month. Buckle Up.

These past few months have been a wild ride when it comes to new technologies, online safety regulations and failed attempts at passing laws at the US federal level. There have been best selling books and international research projects that point in opposite directions.  And we’ve seen the unveiling of Chat GPT 4o, Google’s new AI offerings and Apple is due to drop their latest genAI magic in the coming days.

It’s enough to make a parent’s head swirl.  Should I read Jonathon Haidt’s book, “The Anxious Generation” and keep my kids away from phones and social media?  Or should I be consoled by the latest research that shows that access to the Internet is actually linked to higher wellbeing?  Should I applaud the regulations coming out of the UK and Europe, but worry about the unintended consequences of laws like KOSA in the US? 

Given the complexities of modern life and the exponential change of new technologies, it is not hard to see why parents and caregivers want to seek a simple solution to the vexed question of how much technology to give their kids and at what age.  Haidt’s book has tapped into a (mostly wealthy Western) zeitgeist and the simplicity of his “solutions” are matched by the broad brush by which he paints an entire generation.

Leaving aside the argument that he confuses correlation with causation, by simply declaring that no one under the age of 16 should be allowed on social media, he creates a feel-good cure-all that doesn’t address younger teens’ own rights to access and create content themselves. 

Greta Thunberg began her environmental advocacy at age 15 and used social media to spread the word about her protests.  Malala Yousafzai started blogging at age 11 about life under the Taliban.  Malala went on to utilize a wide range of digital technologies to get her message across and eventually went on to address the United Nations at 16 and to win the Nobel Peace Prize at 17.  I doubt either Greta or Malala would have achieved anything like the global impact they have had if they were denied access to social media until they reached 16.  

As a counterpoint to the media blitz that Haidt has created, the Oxford Internet Institute released a study that has confounded many of those who would prefer to ban and bar kids from their phones and social media apps. It also took a much broader look across 168 countries including Latin America, Africa and Asia and found that “84.9% of associations between internet connectivity and wellbeing were positive and statistically significant”.  While they found areas of concern, particularly among teenage girls, the OII findings and others like them need to be considered in our Global North rush to confiscate devices and restrict access among young people.  

We need to consider a paradigm shift in our thinking about online safety as a child matures.  No one would advocate giving a 5-year-old unfettered access to the web.  It is essential that parents and caregivers are given the tools and the information about how best to filter and restrict the online access of their toddlers and elementary aged children.  Once kids reach middle school, the training wheels begin to come off and by high school, the emphasis should go from monitoring to mentoring. At this point in a child’s life, it is time for helicopter parents to become co-pilots with their kids and to set up household rules with their teens' active participation and input.

And, technologically speaking, the emphasis goes from parental controls to online safety tools - the latter being the ways in which teens and young people block, report, silence or make private their own social media posts.  From our own studies, teens have a very low opinion of parental controls but enthusiastically embrace online safety tools that have been made with them in mind.  

In other words, as a child grows and matures, we move from protection to empowerment - giving our young people the ability to access content, gather online and to create their own expressions of themselves.  Much like Greta and Malala did.  

So this Internet Safety Month, let’s be good digital role models for our kids and resist the temptation to find some quick fix to impose on a generation that is much more than just anxious.