Supporting Champlain Valley School District Youth and Families since 1990

Technology &
​Digital CITIZENSHIP

The average American school age child spends 53 hours a week with entertainment media not including media use for school or homework. Teenagers typically send 3,500 texts a month. 54% of children think their parents check their devices too frequently. Media is changing quickly and we often feel that we don’t have a toolkit to use it properly.
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Benefits and Challenges
What we like...
  • Quick, easy communication,
  • Information at our fingertips,
  • Creative tool
What worries us...
  • Exposure to inappropriate information,
  • No boundaries,
  • Loss of social skills,
  • FOBLO (fear of being left out)
  • Lasting digital imprint
  • Inability to decipher the content value


As parents we tend to vacillate between the two realities of panicking (“give me your phone!”) and being too casual (“I’m sure everything is fine”). Neither extreme approach serves our children very well. The middle road is the harder route. If we “lock down,” then our children don’t get to practice appropriate use of the technology. If we give them the technology and we don’t monitor their use, then we are not coaching and mentoring them on how to use it appropriately.

GET THE FACTS:
What we know is that when we offer our children protective factors, they do better in all aspects of their lives. The protective factors that we want to make sure our children have include:
  • CONNECTION- with peers and adults
  • BOUNDARIES- clear boundaries, clear consequences
  • PARTICIPATION- having a voice

In nurturing healthy use of technology and digital citizenship we must:
  • LOOK for signs that our children are neither the target or the perpetrator
  • PRACTICE strategies for bystanders (don’t forward it, talk to an adult, empathize with the target)
  • TALK about what healthy relationships look like on and offline
  • EXPECT mistakes
  • INVOLVE young people in online safety work including cyber-bullying prevention

Related apps and resources:
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I'd Rather Checklist for Teens
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Video Game Addiction Checklist
Blog Posts and More: