Children's online risk and harm: interviews with Canadian parents
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- Written by Michael Adorjan
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What is most concerning about young people going online today? Is it the risk of exposure to online predators and stalkers, cyberbullying, or the non-consensual redistribution of shared nude images? Is it the influence of ‘online dares’ and potential harms they engender (recall the ‘Momo challenge’ of 2019 (see Robertson Feb 27, 2019))? A few years ago, having started research interviewing teens about their use of technology, and the ‘good, bad’ and ‘ugly’ of their experiences, I was a bit anxious, because I had a young daughter in elementary school, and a new baby boy, and like many new parents, I felt out of touch with what young people today were doing online, and concerned about the range of ‘social bads’ – as risk scholars call them – that seem to afflict (some? most? all?) young people today (Beck 1992).
Shocking headlines are often paralyzing, especially for parents; headlines about harm to, and perpetuated by children and youth, which is facilitated by information communication technologies (ICTs), especially via the seemingly ubiquitous smartphone and the social network sites accessed through them. Young people engaged in acts of physical violence have been reported to distribute video evidence of their crimes via social media, arguably not to provide confessions or externalize guilt, but for an immediate response (such as a Facebook ‘like’) from other social media users online – it is “sharing …for the sake of sharing” (Speed 2016). Stalking and sexual harassment continues to be concentrated on young women online, with images of violence and sometimes murder circulated on social media (Somos 2019). Here on CrimeTalk, Patterson recently wrote about the ways ICTs, especially social network sites on smartphones, can facilitate violence and victimization among adolescents.
Technology and youth are both areas of anxiety to many adults, especially parents, and even more so when mixed with concerns over sex and sexuality. Headlines about teens committing crimes online are disturbing, and we need to be mindful of the more serious forms of criminal behaviours young people may become involved with, and the role of technology in facilitating this. But don’t let the headlines fool you – while articles like those above may make it appear that ‘kids today’ are incorrigible and unreachable, such news discourses exaggerate the more mundane realities youth encounter in their daily lives, not to mention the positive uses and benefits of ICTs, including social media.
Indeed, the kids who are most at risk online are those who are, and have been, more ‘traditionally’ at risk offline in the ways long identified by psychologists and sociologists, including those youth experiencing abuse and violence at home (indeed, most victimization continues to be perpetuated by people who know each other, including family members, not strangers online (Altheide 2002; Finkelhor 2008). Keep in mind: longstanding moral panics often center on youth, when broader societal anxieties during periods of uncertainty and normlessness, often related to issues such as immigration, employment precarity, poverty, disease, etc.) center on particular people and situations exemplifying these anxieties. The ‘tip of the iceberg’ here often being particular youth engaged in crime, which seems to be shifting increasingly online among our modern-day cyber folk devils (Cohen 2002 [1972]).
Today the COVID-19 pandemic has amplified all of the concerns and anxieties highlighted above. This article highlights some preliminary findings from an original research project examining the perceptions and experiences parents and educators have in managing and responding to ‘cyber-risk’ among children and students respectively. The research was conducted with Professor Rosemary Ricciardelli, Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador. My focus here will be on the interviews with parents.
While the interviews were conducted prior to the pandemic, I will be returning to present pandemic circumstances below. My goal is to situate the crime headlines that I started with, with a discussion of parental concerns about their children and ICTs, and what seems to be working – and not working – in response to these concerns. This article will underscore the ‘bads’ and ‘cyber risks’, but also the opportunities presented by ICTs for teens and parents (Adorjan and Ricciardelli 2019; Livingstone 2008); indeed, one of the major challenges is how opportunities and risks are frequently merged on the same devices (e.g., smartphones, tablets).
New applications (apps, especially social media apps often used on smartphones) seem to perpetually trump efforts to keep up with trends. Today many more parents are using Facebook, while youth have been gravitating towards less sullied alternatives such as Instagram, Snapchat, and more recently, TikTok – the latter now being used increasingly by young people for social activism (Lang 2015; McLymore and Wang 2020). Shifting societal norms and expectations of parenting also help make sense of today’s anxieties. Children are kept much closer to home for indoor play (and increasingly, schoolwork) (Boyd 2014; Brown July 19, 2017; Livingstone 2009).
One major takeaway from our research is that parents can greatly allay their anxieties when considering that the most serious cases of online crime and harm do not represent the vast majority of children and teens. These exceptional events grip our collective attention, making us believe that such risks are omnipresent and their impacts likely for our own children. While estimates vary (based on things like how problems like cyberbullying are defined, whether youth identity with these terms, the particular sample of participants, etc.), studies suggest that victimization from serious online aggression and harassment may be less frequent than we often expect (Brochado, Soares and Fraga 2017; Hinduja and Patchin 2014).
Our own research reveals that both young people and parents often worry not so much about serious online harm, but about online addiction, and the general issues around managing technological access, how to effectively monitor that access, and the types of harm exposed to children and teens as a result of this access. In what follows I highlight some of the key areas discussed during interviews by parents, specifically focusing on key concerns and anxieties, and also ‘best practices’ in response to help ameliorate risk and harm. There is no silver bullet solution, of course, to any and all problems encountered, but there are some generally consistent themes running through our research that may be of use to parents, or those interested in ICTs and how youth and parents are experiencing them.
The good: social connection, education and knowledge
During our interviews, many parents comment (or complain) about how disconnected their children seem to be, even when their children are hanging out together. Seemingly always tethered to their phones, teens may be sitting right next to each other, but are communicating largely online, often not speaking a word. This is often frustrating for parents who see their children as being deprived of ‘real’ interactions, where offline ‘old school’ exchanges are seen as more legitimate and impactful. One mother’s reflection exemplifies this:
You know, I just spent a week at my cottage, and I saw my niece and her boyfriend and they constantly have them [smart phones]. They weren’t constantly on them, but they were constantly with them. And so, they were being dragged away to somewhere else instead of being present there. And the parents had it too, and we all talked about let’s put our phones away for the week and you know that was dead. So yeah, I guess that is a concern then. I get really like, “Gaah! You’re here, you’re here with me, why are you looking at this?” But it feels very hypocritical sometimes. [added emphasis]
Note the references here also to adult phone use and the issue of parental modeling – more on this below. Parents in our interviews often had difficulty understanding where their children were being ‘dragged’ to when using their devices. Given the wider societal shifts involving parenting mentioned above, it is no coincidence youth are findings meaning through online social connection. It is important to also consider that what is going on online can be experienced as more real than offline. This is because online interactions, which often blend physically co-present persons with others online, is now ‘nadic’. Consider two people interacting offline (and I purposefully do not refer to offline as ‘real life’): this is classically understood as a dyadic interaction. “N”adic refers to the fact that online, the number of people can vary widely – and sometimes not be known for certain, only as an ‘imagined audience’ (Marwick and Boyd 2014; Tian 2017; Tian and Menchik 2016). This greatly alters communications given the medium of ICTs, and for our purposes, helps make sense of why teens appear disconnected, but in fact are managing a complex web of symbols and interactional cues. If anything, youth are experiencing an emboldening of connectivity that enriches their relationships and provides greater opportunities to acquire information and knowledge online.
It’s important to also consider that teens often connect with the same peers online that they have offline. Our interviews reveal that parents and teens with experiences of cyberbullying or non-consensual sexting usually involved peer groups based on the school classroom. Sure, young people meet strangers online, and sometimes engage in risky interactions and even meet with these contacts offline. But the vast majority of teens ‘hang out’ online with friends that share both online and offline spaces with. This explains the popularity of persistent multi-user virtual games such as Fortnite. Some of the parents we spoke with couldn’t comprehend how their children kept interest in that particular game week after week, month after month. Understanding why requires appreciation of the fact that Fortnite, at least over the last couple of years, has become not only a popular video game but one of the most popular social network sites. Teens tend to gravitate where their friends hang out, and that place/space is no longer outdoor venues, nor even shopping malls. Fortnite is hardly a criminogenic environment, and much of what goes on is relatively innocuous. That said, parental concerns in our research on addiction to smartphones and their efforts at managing these addictive tendencies are not the only concerns frequently expressed by parents, but the issue of technological addiction is so central across our interviews, with both youth and parents, that it is worth explicating in further detail.
The overarching concern: technological addiction and its behavioral impacts
The notion of ‘online addiction’ is a slippery one. Consider that the original term ‘internet addiction disorder’ was a joke – coined in 1995 by psychiatrist Ivan Goldberg when he wrote a satirical essay parodying the concept (Boyd 2014: 81). In 2017 psychologist Jean Twenge’s article in The Atlantic, titled “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” seemed to signal a new wave of moral panic over teens and tech. Pejorative stereotypes of young people as “screenagers” (Rushkoff 2006) further underscored the view, possibly taken up by many parents, of ‘kids today’ being addicted to ICTs by virtue of their status as digital natives (Palfrey and Gasser 2011; Prensky 2001). Sociologists have, of course, drawn longstanding attention to how particular discourses, or ways of speaking/seeing, significantly promote moral panics – here, at the intersections of youth, technology and addiction.
Respected youth and new media scholar Dana Boyd puts it this way: “the language of addiction sensationalizes teens’ engagement with technology and suggests that mere participation leads to pathology. This language also suggests that technologies alone will determine social outcomes” (2014: 78). More recent studies have also narrowed the focus to particular arenas of technological addiction. For instance ‘gaming disorder’ was included in the International Classification of Diseases version 11, along with a proposal for its inclusion in the DSM-5 (Association 2013; see also https://icd.who.int/en). Our own research explores parental perspectives on raising children and technological addiction, who often speak about the various devices their children have access to, to do schoolwork, watch videos, participate in social networks, and play video games.
Our research revealed a wide range of anxieties and concerns parents had regarding their children and technology, but at the time of writing, addiction features as the most prominent. Parents with younger children, including newborn babies, were anxious about pull that ICTs would have in the future. For instance one mother with a young child disclosed being “very concerned” about long-term impacts of technology when her child is older:
I’m hoping when she gets older we can have a discussion and we can foster that kind of environment where she’s not always on her phone and she’s not always relying on technology. There’s a whole world out there that she can go and explore and do and whatever else. So I’m hoping that as she’s older we can do more activities that are focused on just be engaged in our world vs. scrolling through whatever social media you’re on. Yeah, so, I’m hoping that helps but at the same time it’s not gonna help when her friends are maybe not doing that, right?
Beyond the general anxiety about the future, notable in this statement is the distinction between “our world” and the ostensibly ephemeral world of online social media. A prominent theme across our interviews is the lack of felt agency parents have about controlling their children’s environment, especially as they grow older and spend more time online. Often the issues of concern are perennial to raising adolescents – the pull of peer influence. Now, that pull is to the realm of ‘cyberspace’ (a bit of an outmoded term today given the braiding of offline and online interactions as mentioned above). Those parents among our interviewees who seem to be experiencing the most stress often had children in middle school/junior high school, and those parents with more than two children at those ages. Some compared their children’s ‘addiction’ to a drug, recalling times when a child would have a tantrum after being called away from a video game or online chat. One father remarks:
There’s a boy …he comes over a lot …I see that boy and another boy who lives right beside me the amount of time they can spend uninterrupted on a game, 'cause once they go in that basement with my neighbours and we socialize as neighbours we can do all kinds of things as neighbours, all the other kids can play, but those two boys on the game, it’s like they’re hooked. They’re in it and it’s like - then when they’re taking off with all the children but it’s almost like withdrawal for 45 minutes and their behaviour like pissed off and kind of tweaking, kinda crazy and bitchy, pardon my language.
Interestingly, there were a handful of parents with teens who lacked the addictive tendencies found in the majority of the parents we spoke with. These teens had close-knit offline peer groups who, collectively, did not feel the draw to go online and did not seem to possess a fear of missing out what is happening online. Some of these teens had friends who would regularly get together to play role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons. In other words, such teens held reference groups that did not lead them to feel the need to go online to connect with others, or care about others’ views about themselves. Nevertheless, these teens were in the minority in our research.
Parental responses: regulation, monitoring and surveillance
Let’s go back to those paralyzing news stories at the outset of the article. In response to such headlines, and in response to their general anxieties about raising teens immersed in ICTs, parents’ natural instinct may be to restrict access to these technologies, and/or actively surveil their children’s online activities, and otherwise adopt a ‘helicopter’ or ‘lawnmower’ approach to parenting in the early 21st century. Helicopter parents ‘hover’ over their children, always at the ready to ‘swoop down’ and help with a problem, often pre-emptively. Lawnmower parents, on the other hand, clear a path for their children, removing obstacles and potential obstacles in the way (Brown 2017). I should note that many of the parents we interviewed were aware of these terms and took a critical approach to them – some identified with these terms, others were more critical of parenting strategies aligned with them. Nevertheless, running across virtually all our interviews, parents spoke of rules and restrictions at home to govern their childrens’ use and access to technology.
In our previous research with teens, we discovered that some parents were using various applications to monitor screen time, track location and, more invasively, ‘spy’ on their children using applications that would produce detailed reports about who their children ‘friend’ online, what they post, and an array of information that some parents feel helps them keep better tabs on their children – a sort of ‘tough love’ approach that is justified through the goal of keeping children safe and secure.
As you may expect, teens often express a marked lack of enthusiasm over being surveiled by their parents. For instance, when asked about parental surveillance of her smartphone, one 13-year-old responded that she would “feel so uncomfortable” if her parents “went through all [her] pictures on [her] phone,” especially if it involves pictures with her friends “doing something.” She adds “not that I have anything to hide, but if they had to go through it I wouldn’t mind, it’s just I feel so uncomfortable, like I take, that’s practically my life, just looking through it” (Adorjan and Ricciardelli 2019: 55; added emphasis; see chapter 4 of this book for elaboration in relation to privacy mindsets as well as school surveillance). Some of the parents we spoke with, who had younger children, expressed a degree of enthusiasm over the various technologies that can be used to monitor their children and help them out as parents. Such applications are often marketed to parents – particularly mothers – as a singular solution for keeping children safe from risk and harm.
Often lost among the drive to fix technological problems with technological solutions is the fact that ‘monitoring’ can include regular, verbal check-ins with children to see what’s going on in their lives. The parents we found the most confident in managing online risk and harm developed early practices with their children when they were young, fostered trust and regular communication, and had a sense of the balancing role technology can play in promoting social connection as well as entertainment and escape. The teens we spoke with in our previous project were most opposed to being ‘spied’ upon by parents using surveillance software with their knowledge. This besmirched trust and also violated their privacy.
Parents themselves are often well aware of the careful balance required when considering using such technologies. Many of the parents we spoke with were also opposed to using ‘spyware’, but what comes across in the discussions is often a willingness to consider using such software in the future, if parents were to feel their children are in particular trouble and at-risk for harm. Those with the most confidence and sense of control over the role technology plays in their lives had some general practices at home:
- Start young, and start developing regular communication about things like respect, friendship, consent, and other benchmarks of sociality that matter the most as children begin to communicate and connect online.
- Have a table or area of the living room or kitchen where phones and tablets, etc. reside overnight, at least while children are younger (no technology at the dinner table helps refocus attention to the family and offline communication). No technology in the bedroom for younger children and young teens – it is too easy for teens to lose sleep (and this eventually impacting school performance) with phones in the bedroom, where the buzz of a social media notification can wake a young person in the middle of the night, potentially increasing anxieties and concerns.
- Know your child, and develop guidelines that are in sync with their personality and the family’s lifestyle. Often parents decide to give their child their first smartphone at the age they begin to go to school independently – e.g., taking the bus alone. Many of the parents we spoke with also said their children received their first cell phone at an age when many of their peers began to more regularly communicate on their own devices, and children without such devices would lose out opportunities for social connection and risk feeling excluded from their peers. What seems to work best here is to have children initially have access to family-owned devices, including for messaging friends every now and then. Some parents waited until their children were old enough to have part time jobs and save the money for their own device, including paying for data plans.
- Starting to implement strict technologies restrictions for teens where none have existed before is ineffective – the restrictions will be strongly resisted. Teens are adept at circumventing restrictions if they want to, getting ‘burner’ phones, creating alternative social media accounts, and generally staying one step ahead of parents.
- In general, without some of the proactive strategies in place above, starting to actively use invasive ‘spyware’ technologies is likely to further debase trust and communication (it will be only a matter of time before such technologies are detected), and in some cases, such software may be unreliable – we’ve heard of stories of parents using such technologies experiencing problems that may open their own devices to privacy breaches; it is ironic that parents may be the ones whose online activities are actively surveiled by cheap 3rd party surveillance applications.
- As much as possible, parents should practice the same rules they have for their children (this one is significant - more on this below!)
Checking the mirror: adult technological addictions and behavioural modeling
Lost in much of the moral panics over youth and technology, and how best to regulate it, is the fact that many parents (and adults in general) are equally, if not more so, ‘addicted’ to their devices. The teens we interviewed for our previous research told interesting stories about their own parents’ habits of checking phones during ‘no technology’ meals, or even watching online movies on a phone while out for a family meal. Teens pick up and model what they see, and what they see early on is the behaviours of their parents. One mother expressed being “terrified” over her six year-old desiring a phone – “you should not want a phone” at that age. “But I don’t know. Maybe it’s because her dad sits on it all the time…”. Another mother:
Sometimes too, parents are afraid for their kids but then sometimes …“well what are the parents doing too?” The parents are on Snapchat or Instagram, so the kids are just emulating what the parents do as well. So, partly why my kids might not is because my husband has no social media accounts, I only have Facebook…
Indeed, parents’ own tech addictions is a behavioural blind spot and this is no accident – societal discourses don’t focus much on them, favoring attention on children and youth.
The challenges above are all greatly exacerbated under our present-day pandemic circumstances. Many parents are homeschooling their children (by choice for some), with schoolwork accomplished exclusively online. Greater time at home leads to greater use of ICTs and greater stress on parents’ abilities to manage and regulate access in a balanced way. There is no clear solution and our research doesn’t suggest any singular practice or approach will work on all children and youth. Indeed, personality and age play a large role in ‘what works’ best. But it is important to keep in mind – the core issues of growing up, being a child or adolescent, haven’t changed much at all. As one father expressed it, parenting is “terribly wonderful”, requiring parents to embrace with confidence both the opportunities and risks that come with ICTs – both for their children and for themselves.
There is much to value in qualitative research aimed at understanding the understandings people have; in this case, the perceptions and experiences parents have regarding the role of ICTs in their children’s lives. This research captures the depth of situated experiences, and greatly complements quantitative approaches that better capture breadth in statistically significant samples. What this research indicates is not only areas of anxiety parents have, but ‘best practices’ they’ve developed. Beyond contributing to various academic theories and conceptual areas, our goal is to have this research play a role in helping parents realize the extent to which their anxieties and experiences are shared, and also to offer helpful directions to effectively manage ‘cyber-risk’. Parents can begin by candidly assessing their own use of ICTs and modeling the behaviours they expect from their children. Technology changes rapidly, popular social network sites comes and go, but compared to previous generations, being an adolescent today is not as alien as it may appear.
References
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Written by Michael Adorjan, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Calgary and Associate Editor, CrimeTalk. This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
