Yes, our kids really do need digital skills for the future

Published 1:30 am Sunday, January 30, 2022

My adolescent experience was radically different than what my kids deal with now. I went to high school without a cell phone. I graduated college without a cell phone. I din’t have a smart phone until I was well into my thirties. These are facts about my life that my teen and tweenager find mind boggling. When I tell them that I didn’t have my first email address until I was a senior in high school, they laugh.

I am vigilant about teaching my kids social media safety, but I also understand that apps I might not care about, like TikTok, are part of their future.

My opinion, that kids should be taught how to master social media instead of encouraged to avoid it, is radically different than most of my friends. Most parents hate that their kids have phones and would rather them not be on social media at all. They see social media as something that causes more harm than good.

I agree that social media can cause harm. That’s why we need to teach our kids how to navigate it. We’d never tell our kids: “Don’t go into the ocean, you’ll die.” Instead, we teach them to swim. When we teach them to swim we don’t say: “Okay, I guess I’ll teach you swim if I have to, but only once you turn fourteen, and then I’ll watch your every stroke like a hawk.” No, we teach them to swim early on, with the goal of them being such a strong swimmer that they can survive any current.

Parents want kids to have job skills, but many adults don’t see mastering social media as a skill that will be important later. By “mastering” I mean, knowing how to take engaging pictures, learning how to produce video clips, understanding hashtags and captions, knowing how to block people and studying the communication nuances from one app to the next. For example, on Twitter re-tweeting someone is a compliment; on Instagram re-gramming a picture is often considered stealing.

Imagine this. Let’s say your twenty-three year old daughter is applying to be hired as a hairdresser at a salon. There are two candidates up for the position and both of them have equal styling skills. Whom will the salon hire? The stylist with a private Instagram account, or the one with a public account with 2,000 followers where she often shares her work? The stylist who is social-media savvy brings free advertising with her.

I would never tell my kids to start a YouTube channel so they can get into college, but I know of at least one local student who got into Harvard and Princeton in part due to her social media prowess.

Rather than parents asking their teens: “Why are you spending so much time on your phone?” I think we should be asking: “What are you doing on your phone and are you doing it well?”

Jennifer Bardsley publishes books under her own name and the pseudonym Louise Cypress. Find her online on Instagram @jenniferbardsleyauthor, on Twitter @jennbardsley or on Facebook as Jennifer Bardsley Author. Email her at teachingmybabytoread@gmail.com.