What Kind of Digital Parent Are You?

By Tinybeans Team May 14, 2018

Parents in today’s digital world are raising the future of technology. Building children’s confidence and resilience is key for them to get the best of a sometimes-overwhelming but incredible and useful digital world. There are 3 very distinct approaches to digital parenting each with benefits and downfalls. Find out which technique you use most frequently and learn about the others to incorporate all positive aspects of digital parenting in your home.

Digital Parent #1: The Limiter

Limiter parents essentially keep their kids offline for the most part and strictly limit screen time. They see what a tough place the digital world can be and keep their children out of the digital world for as long as possible. This happens more frequently in younger years. Limiters typically take the front seat with the internet at home but don’t teach their children how to use technology, the internet or apps responsibly.

Often times, limiter parents do less research on specific programs or apps that their children will be using and rarely enroll their children in some type of class or workshop that teaches tech skills. In turn, the limiting will often produce children who statistically tend to access pornography, bully others and impersonate an adult at a higher rate than the two other digital groups of kids.

Digital Parent #2: The Enabler

Enabler parents give their children a good amount of trust to their kids and let them make their own choices when it comes to online use. While recognizing what a huge part the digital world will play in their kids’ lives, enablers often times leave it up to their children to explore technology without guiding them through it.

About 1 in 3 enabler parents provide technology guidance at least once a week through interactive play in video games and taking opportunities to teach online responsibility or resources teaching about technology such as articles or videos. Once kids reach high school, more parents fall into this category of digital parenting. Because of this, enablers’ kids at school-age have a higher rate of engaging with strangers online.

Digital Parent #3: The Mentor

Mentor parents take an active role in preparing their children to be responsible citizens in a digital world. They guide their children’s online usage by spending time online with them, encouraging online learning and helping their children develop digital skills. Because this approach works well with all ages, mentor parents make up about a third of parents in each age group. This approach creates digital kids who are least likely of all three groups to engage in any online misbehavior.

Parents’ approach to managing technology in the home directly influences their child’s behavior in the online world. To ensure they are safe, choose to be a mentor parent that will guide and instruct them.

Featured Photo Courtesy: Wavebreak Media via Shutterstock