Devorah Heitner is a new friend from The Zen Parenting Conference. I really appreciated what she had to say about doing more mentoring and less monitoring with our kids and their screens. This feels like a really hard time to be raising teens and dealing with all the tech. Cutting off access to technology isn’t reasonable, so how can we engage with our teens about how they use tech? How can we resist over-monitoring with school portals and Find my iPhone at our disposal? How can we teach teens self-regulation with their own screen time?

Devorah shares ways we can help our adolescents notice how tech makes them feel so they can better self-regulate. She shares thoughts on the difference between a mistake and a chronic problem, seeing our kid’s posts, and what she’s hearing from teens about their experience right now. We discuss how we can make sure our kids know we’re really there for them when things go wrong, when kids want to be influencers, and how to manage it if we find our teens are doing harm online. 

Takeaways from the show

• Devorah’s New Book: “Growing Up in Public: Coming of Age in a Digital World”  
• Technology is how teens connect with their friends and peers 
• Sharing your own experiences online 
• Tracking your teen’s location via their phone - more or less stress? 
• Having conversations, not lectures
• Even though we know technology, our teens grew up with it in an entirely different way & they think we’re clueless 
• It’s good that adolescents do brave, scary, & hard things (even when they scare us) - otherwise they’d never try anything 
• Kids who want to be influencers, YouTubers, & go viral 
• What to do if your kid is being harmed or harming others online 
• Being open & curious about your teen’s world & resisting assumptions

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