Devorah Heitner is on a mission: “to bridge the gap between adults, parents, educators, and young people [so that they can] adopt a more positive, less fear-based approach to mentoring kids on growing up in the digital world.” She tackles issues from going viral to porn to “sharenting” to sexting to getting canceled to filters to ClassDojo, grade portals, and college applications, ultimately concluding that we’re quite far from the ideal when it comes to helping our kids deal with a culture of living online. “In our quest to be caring, involved parents, we have been encouraged to surveil our kids: tracking their location, checking up on grades, and scanning their communications with friends. We do this … without realizing we’re interrupting their process of becoming independent.”
To move from monitoring to mentoring, Heitner convincingly argues, requires us to (1) model respect for boundaries, privacy, and consent, (2) help them develop the judgment they need to navigate a sometimes treacherous web of opportunities and unwritten rules, and (3) trust them to exercise it independently. With helpful analogs drawn from ’90s teenagerhood and an understanding of the “complex social labor” demanded of teens today, Heitner helps readers get the “tension between freedom and constraint” today’s teen’s experience as they “have more freedom to explore their identity [and] also have less freedom to get away from the identities they have created and ‘start over.’”
“Growing up in public is a lot. A lot of pressure. A lot of distraction. A lot of surveillance. Sometimes, it is a lot of power and influence.” And the mix makes for a lot of missed connections with parents and teachers, a lot of chafing dependence, and a lot of anxiety. Heitner ably helps us think about what that means for all of us and where to go from here.
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