Keeping Up With Technology: A Parent’s Guide
Keeping up with technology can be tricky, as it’s advancing at a breakneck pace, but it’s essential for our family’s safety.
There seems to be so many developments and updates, with too little time to catch up; When we’re just getting comfortable with a new device or app, another one comes along!
If you’re a parent who finds keeping up with technology difficult, know that you’re not alone and many (if not most) are on the same bandwagon.
What are the things we can do to understand and navigate more easily through the technological and digital landscape?
Here’s some tips:
Open Conversation and Understanding
Have an open conversation with your children every so often to learn what’s popular in their age group.
Ask them about their favourite apps, devices, websites, digital games, and social media platforms.
Get their opinions on various trending apps and new technologies.
Take time to familiarise yourself with the ones that your children are most likely to use.
You can’t (and perhaps shouldn’t) keep children away from technology completely.
However, you can use conversations as a starting point to help them understand how to use technology responsibly and safely.
Engaging in conversations with other parents to hear their experiences is another way to get ideas too.
Allow Your Child to Teach You
The latest technologies are developed with children in mind, so they tend to be adept at handling them.
This means parents can leverage the knowledge and skills of their kids!
There’s absolutely no shame in keeping up with technology by learning from children.
When children see that you’re open to learning from them, they’ll be more than willing to share their knowledge with you.
Request demonstrations, ask relevant questions, and in general, remain quite active while learning.
They’ll feel proud of you when you’re able to use apps or devices the way they’ve taught you!
Develop Healthy Tech Habits and Encourage Proper Netiquette
It’s important to develop and adhere to healthy tech-related habits.
Set ground rules for the family (including you) to follow, such as all family members must put their devices away during mealtimes.
Kids are more likely to follow rules if they are watching you also adhering to them.
Consult your children and take their opinions into account when setting the rules, which helps make them feel heard and valued.
You may also need to explain the necessity of some of your rules.
The entire family might start a practice due to a rule, but it will, in time, become a healthy habit.
Acquiring knowledge about the current digital landscape will also help you teach your kids proper netiquette.
Teach them how to be safe and responsible digital citizens.
One way is to master the use of VPN to ensure the safety of your family online and to protect your privacy.
Protect Your Kids and Your Data
Although you will do your best to teach children to be safe on the internet, things can still go wrong sometimes.
One accidental click can expose your child to harmful content or put them in danger.
You can try to prevent such an incident by having proper parental controls in place.
Understand and utilise the latest parental control tools in the digital world.
Ensure children understand that parental control tools are in place for their protection, not because you don’t trust them.
Use a secure password generator service to create and manage unique passwords to help protect your family’s data online.
Final Thoughts
We can improve parenting strategies with the help of technology.
By keeping up with technology we keep ourselves up-to-date with the latest technologies.
This means we’re better able to guide our children regarding safe tech use.
Regularly updating our technological knowledge ensures helps protect our families from potential risks.
This is a sponsored guest post.