Smartphones and Your Child’s Safety
Your child has just come home from a day at school, throwing his backpack and loudly stomping across the floor and slamming his door shut. You ask him from the other side of the door what happened at school that made him upset. You try to open the door but its locked. He slides his phone under the door to show you a very mean and public post on social media from another child. You then are wondering if it was a good decision purchasing it for him in the first place.
That’s the thing with a future based on the development of new technology; it is important to identify how phones affect us in society, especially when kids and teenagers are getting their own phones and being exposed to a large amount of the internet. The reason I am writing this is because I am invested in providing informed advice in making decisions using the internet and as an older brother to three younger siblings I want to see them avoid the issues I have encountered.
Technology has an exponential amount of features that are being peddled to consumers to increase product sales and the mining of information with laws not nearly being adapted fast enough. In order to adequately protect your children on mobile phones there are some things you can do to take matters in to your own hands. I know it can be difficult with the responsibilities of the home, pets and putting food on the table so I want to keep this guide simple and straight to the point.
In this post I will identify three different methods to make using a smartphone safer for your children. This can be achieved by filtering inappropriate content using a content filter , limiting how long your creative geniuses look at the screen and indirectly address ways those very same children might work around your restrictions and preventing it from happening.
Content filtering identifies key words like “sex” , “gambling” and “weapons” and is ample at limiting adult content exposure to younger kids. When I was developing I believe that at its core, access to this adult content made communicating with and respecting women as sources of great creativity and perspective much more difficult than it should have been. During our teenage years, as we all know, is absolutely chaotic. We find ourselves growing more aware of our appearance, the appearance of others and even what judgements people make about us. Hormones come into play and the majority of the logic we used to have crumbles. Fuel the hormones with artificial and unrealistic expectations on both women and men and it will be an uphill battle to obtain a healthy relationships with our natural counterparts.
URL filtering restricts access to websites such as Facebook, Instagram and others. If your child frequently accesses a website that you believe has an negative impact on them you can blacklist it from being accessed using their mobile browser. To me this solution is essentially a second line of defense because you don't really know what they are using until it comes up in either a conflict or history.
Screen Time and Attachment Issues is common concern for many now a days. I utilize this feature to limit how long I spend on social media even now. It locks certain applications on a schedule and gives parents access to the appropriate data using a family icloud account. Phones have been shown to decrease attention span and make users less aware of their surroundings and this can be a serious problem if getting off the bus without assistance or in the middle of a school day where the student is supposed to be learning.
Small Story:
My mother use to work in mental health with emergency services. She has told me many stories of parents who come in because they need help accessing services to control their children with severe mobile dependencies. They are unaware of how to resolve the problem because when they threaten to take the phones away the children threaten to kill themselves. Ultimately children view their phone as their life and their connection to the world around them and know that parents wont bother confronting a threat that involves the loss of their child. She said, “it is as if the phone has become another appendage.” These parents are so fearful in their assertiveness to establish consequences that when they attempt to assign restrictions, the children are unable to meet them and do not give in. By restricting what kids can do with their phone without having to take it away for long and not repeatedly you can gain some comfort that your instruction is being supported by their technology as well.
I hope this article clarifies a few things for you and helps you protect your children's digital presence. If you have any questions feel free to reach out to me.
