Art Of Digital Age Parenting And Challenges

Smartphone revolution is on.Internet is now everywhere and accessible to every one from a child of 3 years to a senior citizen. More conveniences and ease of doing right from your home for every purpose of day to day life. Making life easier and fun on one side and throwing challenges on the other hand.

Being a Psychologist many cases we see where parents are struggling to sustain smooth and happy parenting. Children are finding parents as enemies when they restrict either internet or say no to smartphone usage similarly parents are loosing their patience in convincing the children for not using the internet and gadgets.

It's time to analyse where the problem begins, every parent wants their kid should not face the hardships and problems what they have faced during their childhood so they start giving the children all the goodies as surprise and start pamper them.

Every parent assumes that his child is more intelligent than him and should be given all the opportunities to get a bright career, in the process he wont recognise that each passing generation is more clever than previous and its a natural phenomenon that his child is fares better than him/her.

This makes parent to invest beyond his capacity on the child and makes his life miserable and looses attention on the child during this struggling process. As and when parent is not accessible to children or lost attention on them , they try to capitalise or depend on the society and friends circle and their life pattern changes away from parents expected lines of brought up. This creates conflicts between child and parent.

Family system is changing rapidly over the years and common family is now rare to find and its nuclear families are finding it difficult to cope up their ends met without both life partners are on job. This is making children to depend on paid assistance or at times children are made to sit before television sets and also with smart phones to make them eating at the early stages.

Here the first exposure to digital devises happen and in no time children learn to browse nursery rhymes to film songs on the youtube channels. Initially parents boast to friends and family members that my child is very clever and independtly handle smart phone at this age itself. But later on the same parent comes to Psychologist for counselling the child for not using the smart phone.

once the child is off the track to enjoy the content like obscene and porn, child starts behaving differently and starts shouting on parents, wants to spend time alone with phone and laptop with internet connections, avoids going to family functions and stop mingling with society. Child who never leaves parents once, after this addiction allows his parents to even go out of station leaving him alone at home.

They show little or no interest even on their favorite food and sports and games. Once parents stop controlling the internet connection and smart phone, laptops he starts going to internet centers and gets habituated to even stealing money to meet his desires. Slowly this transforms the child into an anti social personality.

Now the challenge is to groom the children carefully is possible with close association with children and being friendly and accessiblle to them all times to tell what is good for them and what is not.

Always ask them to use internet on the common desktop which is placed in the common hall so that famliy members can see what is doing on the system. See that the system is having firewalls on and security levles for children are set at medium or high and country is set as India. Avoid smart phone to kids strictly until he reaches his graduation at least. Keep passwords for your personal phones and laptops where parents have a habit of watching adult content.

These days of unlimited internet is causing problems like your neighbor who wont use password for his wifi router may spoil your kid indirectly.

So its always be cautious about unsecured wifi connections surrounding your residence and in the schools they study. Start discussing about kids who spoiled due to these bad browsing habits during the dining table gathering and let children participate to tell their views.

By RAGHU BHUSHAN ERANKI