From a young age, children born in the 21st century are exposed to digital technologies, social media platforms, and online content. Because of this, digital information and screen time are now central components of childhood, exponentially increasing the time children spend with digital devices.

Research suggests that when a young child spends too much time with a digital device, they may experience developmental issues later in life. Deficits in social interactions and fine motor skills are among the most worrisome risks families face as they grapple with parenting in the digital age.

Many parents are naturally concerned about this. Whether it’s online predators, inappropriate content, excessive screen time, digital addiction, or other issues with online safety, parents’ concerns are understandable and valid. 

In response, today’s parents often choose to implement a strategy for keeping their children safe in a volatile digital landscape. This may involve implementing parental controls on apps and digital devices, instituting tech-free zones, or employing other tactics. No matter what strategy they choose, parents and homeschool instructors need to set clear boundaries with students about screen time so children understand the important balance of online and offline life.

While the Internet offers many educational benefits for children, parents must balance the upside of screen time with its potential for harm. 

Challenges with Parenting in the Digital Age

Parenting children is one of life’s greatest joys–and one of its greatest challenges. Until the advent of the digital age, however, most parenting challenges were quite similar from generation to generation, even if the circumstances were different. Raising children in 2024 presents parents with entirely new dilemmas, from developing online safety protocols to preventing digital addiction to finding quality content for their children to consume.

Perhaps the most obvious challenge to parenting in the digital age is the ubiquity of digital technology. For most modern-day parents, the vast majority of whom came of age when the Internet was non-existent or in its infancy, monitoring a child’s online activities wasn’t even fathomable, much less the daily responsibility it has become. Today, the risks posed to children by the digital world are ever-present and increasingly concerning. 

Many of the questions that have arisen in the digital era deal with topics families previously never even had to consider. Raising children in today’s information-dense environment requires parents to focus not only on their children’s development but also on their online safety. 

Here are just a handful of questions that previous generations never had to grapple with:

• How much information should children be exposed to?
• How often should parents check their kids’ digital devices?
• What kinds of information should children see?
• How much time should children spend with digital technology?
• What kinds of problems might children develop from their relationship with technology?

Keeping children safe no longer simply involves preventing them from falling down a well or playing in traffic. Today, it means managing screen time, configuring parental control apps, minimizing digital distractions, and setting clear boundaries for digital usage. 

The Moral Ambiguity of Parental Controls

Perhaps the most maddening aspect of parenting in the digital age is the moral ambiguity technology has brought us. While most digital ecosystems (Android, Mac, Windows, etc.) offer parental controls to help moms and dads keep their kids on task and away from threats, parents are the ones who must make decisions on when to use them and to what degree. These controls are not perfect, but even if they were, they could never prevent the complex moral dilemmas parents often face. 

Here are just two examples:

Privacy vs. Safety

There is a strong argument for using digital tools to protect children from online predators, cyberbullying, and inappropriate content. However, heavily monitoring a child’s digital activity can become invasive and potentially undermine the trust children should have in their parents. Finding the right balance between too much and not enough is often a moving target. 

Autonomy vs. Guidance

Parents must also find a balance between giving children autonomy to make their own mistakes and learn from them and guiding their actions to prevent serious blunders that could have life-long consequences.

In both instances, the parents are responsible for making the right call and finding the moral clarity to follow through on their decisions. Unfortunately, the answers aren’t always clear. In many cases, it comes down to how you want to raise your children and what kind of adults you want them to become. 

Screen time is a major source of angst for parents and instructors, with many uncertain about how much is too much. This is understandable because recommendations beyond the age of 5 are open to discussion. 

The American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry recommends limiting screen time completely for children under 18 months. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no more than one hour of screen time per day for children ages 2-5. Beyond that, however, neither organization has a defined set of guidelines. This is probably because there are a number of factors (homework, weekends, behavioral issues, etc.) that can make the right answer complicated. 

Overcoming Digital Parenting Struggles

Due to the relatively brief history of the digital age, there aren’t many longitudinal studies from which parents can draw consensus. Fortunately, the lengthy history of parenting itself may offer answers to overcoming the struggles of digital parents. 

Here are a handful of time-tested parenting strategies that still work today.

Adhere to Values

While moral principles and standards may change from generation to generation, it’s important for families to establish and reinforce clear and definable values. As parents, you get to determine what virtues you want to instill in your children, and you can develop strategies to integrate those values into your family dynamics and the digital world more broadly.

Promote Safety

Throughout the ages, parents have protected their children, so aiming to minimize digital harm is a good common practice, especially in the digital age. There is plenty of upside to the internet, but it’s important children stay informed about serious risks like stranger danger and violent content.

Set Boundaries

Nobody likes to be treated arbitrarily (especially teenagers), so it’s important to set clear and understandable boundaries with open communication. For example, you might want to cut off screen time at 9 p.m. so as not to interfere with sleep cycles. Set the boundary, outline the consequences for transgression, and follow through with those consequences if and when the boundary is breached. 

Show Leadership

Follow your own rules and lead by example. If you have a cutoff time for looking at screens, you should follow it, too. This can be difficult sometimes, especially because parents have other factors, like work, to consider. This is all the more reason to demonstrate your commitment to the rules you’ve set. Your own screen time should, in some ways, mirror your children’s screen time, except for things like responding to emails and paying bills.

Provide Redirection

Help your kids find alternatives to digital devices. If students are going to spend hours of their day not glued to screens, they had better have other activities worth doing. Reading physical books, playing music, sports, arts and crafts, writing, gardening, cooking, and more can be great alternatives to screens.

Be Receptive

Everyone likes to feel heard (especially kids), so listen to your students’ feedback and be willing to act on it. If they feel that a rule is unfair or unworkable and have a suggestion that would improve it, take it into consideration. Maybe your student loves computer programming and wants more screen time to master their skills. Give them the opportunity to communicate openly about their needs and experiences.

Download this worksheet to measure the health of your family’s approach to technology and identify ways to overcome common digital struggles.

Maximizing the Use of Digital Learning

While the Internet can be a dark and dangerous place, it is also one of the greatest achievements in human history. Never before has so much information been so freely available to so many people at once. Just a few decades ago, access to this much information required a library card, and even then, much of the information was either outdated or missing. Today, anyone with a wifi connection has centuries of learning, multitudes of empirical studies, and thousands of videos on nearly any subject right at their fingertips. 

Despite the incredible impact the Internet has had on mankind, this vast, readily available firehose of information has created a new and confounding problem: sorting truth from fiction. 

Perhaps the biggest academic contribution you can make to your child’s life is teaching them how to assess information sources critically. To do this effectively, students need to understand how to discern a fact-based source from an opinion-based one. Otherwise, they won’t be able to tell the difference. 

The best sources of information tend to come from raw data aggregators, such as university websites (for academic research), government websites (for publicly available statistical sets, such as collision numbers, death rates, or employment figures), and online encyclopedias (specifically ones that provide footnotes to source material). There are, of course, plenty of trusted sources within each field of knowledge or industry, but it’s important (and necessary) for students to question the perspectives and biases of the sources providing information they want to use in their research or essays. 

To critically assess information sources, students need parameters for how to tell what’s reliable and what isn’t. Parents and instructors can help by providing a framework for how to assess the information. They might want to show students how to: 

1. Dig deep into search pages (reminding them that the first few entries are often ads)
2. Research the credibility of authors, experts, and websites
3. Identify publication dates to verify the relevance of information (especially in rapidly evolving fields or topics)
4. Evaluate citations and references to determine whether the information is backed by credible evidence

Sadly, the sources of unreliable, misleading, and factually incorrect material are all too plentiful. Social media, artificial intelligence, chatbots, and even some news outlets aren’t typically reliable because they tend to omit facts, change details, or truncate material. In many cases, these are honest errors; in others, they are not. 

One good exercise is to ask students to provide a verbal summary of what they think an article will be about just from reading the headline. After they’re done, direct them to read the entire article and ask them if it accurately reflects the headline. This will help them understand how information can become skewed, which will help them think more critically about the reliability of the information they consume. 

Another good way for students to maximize their digital learning experience is through the use of trusted apps. Many educational apps provide valuable learning experiences within a walled garden of content. These apps are safe to use and provide a healthy balance of screen time and learning.

One of our favorite online tools is Demme Learning’s Digital Toolbox, which provides free access to content and useful teaching resources. Even if you don’t have an existing account with us, you can take advantage of the Digital Toolbox’s virtual manipulatives and instructional materials. With our Early Access experience on our new platform, you can explore the same content and resources as well as provide feedback on the improved navigation, cleaner design, and better mobile usability. You will still have the option to use the original Digital Toolbox at any time.

Embracing the Digital Challenge with Confidence

For better or worse, digital technology is here to stay. That means finding the right balance between how often kids spend time with their devices in the virtual world and how often they spend time with their friends and family in the real world.

There is no way to remove time spent on screens completely, nor should you want to. When they become adults, children will spend much of their lives and careers working on computers, tablets, and smartphones. In this regard, they need to understand how to use these tools to be productive, technologically literate citizens.

Parents today are in uncharted territory. Block technology too much, and you create a knowledge gap between your kids and their peers. Give them too much freedom, and they could face unexpected dangers. 

Yet, even with all the challenges posed by the digital age, setting clear boundaries, encouraging critical thinking, and choosing the right tools can help parents navigate this complex landscape and stay actively involved in their children’s digital lives.

Want More Learning Resources? Sign Up For a Free Demme Learning Account!