Mindful magazine has an interview with child and adolescent psychiatrist Tristan Gorrindo about teens and social media. It has a nice overview of how teenage social and neurological development can create problems with social media use– how identity formation, the growing complexity of relationships with parents, and impulsivity can make life online (and life in general) difficult– as well as a couple other good observations:

parents who don’t understand the technology… lean towards either setting totally strict limits (as in: “You’re not going to be on the Internet at all”), or they are totally laissez-faire. They don’t understand the tech, don’t know how to set the limits, and so they don’t.

Gorrindo also notes the futility of keeping kids offline:

Abstinence is not an option. You’re better off teaching your kids how to use these tools effectively and appropriately and help them navigate the times when they are going to trip and stumble as opposed to just trying to insulate and wall them off.

Personally, I think this is very smart, and exactly the right advice. As parents of older kids, our responsibility is less to protect children from dangers and hardships and complexity (certainly the last two), and more to prepare our kids to deal with them. In effect, our job is to make our children independent enough to function without us always being around, because at some point we won’t be (and probably won’t want to be).

Further, using technologies well can be a real pleasure, can make you smarter, and make you a better person. Teaching kids that information technologies are bad is like teaching them that food is bad, or sex is inherently evil: you can make the case, but over the long run the wiser thing to do is to teach kids how to make good, self-aware choices.

It also reflects the fact that the most powerful way to get kids to use technologies well is to model good behavior, and to reflect on your own experience. Unless you’ve grown up in a prison camp in North Korea and only recently moved here, you’ve grown up with computers and video games, and you know their attractions and downsides better than your children do. The fact that you remember when cellphones weighed two pounds and only made calls doesn’t make you obsolete or mean you have no authority to help your kids find their own balance with technology: it means you have a valuable perspective that they don’t.