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The post-Christmas period is a great time for kids to enjoy their presents, especially to explore the gifts that involved new technologies such as mobile phones, mp3s and ipods.

It can also be a great opportunity for parents to take the time to ‘share the learning’ so they can better understand the technology in their kids’ lives.

At the same time, kids can be a bridge or pathway for their parents to overcome their own inhibitions around the challenges presented by the rapidly changing nature of new technologies.

Issues such as invasion of privacy (by sharing private, intimate or defamatory material), cyber bullying and unexpected cost blow outs are repeatedly mentioned.

Many parents say they are concerned that they don’t understand the technology involved so can’t limit or guide their children’s use of the facility. 

We need to remember that whenever a new technology is introduced into a community, such as television, there have been concerns about its impact and influence on society.

The difference with recent technology though is that while we can advocate for ‘controls’ to be put in place that will act as ‘protections’ for users, especially kids, new technology such as mobile phones and the internet are much harder to ‘police’ or control.

This means there is less opportunity for parents to mediate in the use or potential misuse of this particular technology.

Technology isn’t going to go away just because adults are frightened of its existence or don’t understand it.

As a community we need to work out what behaviours we can use to find our comfort zone for kids and technology.  It’s also important to remember that just because kids have the ability to use something doesn’t mean they will do so inappropriately.

Like earlier technologies we need to work out the social protocols and ‘rules’ of the new to determine what is acceptable behaviour or what may not be appropriate.

This will involve judgement calls about behaviours but like other areas of kids lives, these decisions will be based on the age and skills of a child and their ability to cope responsibly with situations.

It also means being realistic about the risks involved. While unfamiliar can be scary, it doesn’t necessarily mean that bad things are happening.

Adults often see technology as a burden or another new thing to learn but parents and others can use technology to engage with kids.

Kids are in a different part of the life cycle, they’re in a perpetual environment of learning how to make sense of the world, how to do things. And if they don’t know they want to find out!

So technology isn’t a burden to them, it's new and exciting and gives kids an opportunity to be the expert at something, to be able to show or teach their parents something they don’t know.

We know there is pressures on kids to use technology – social, peer and educational – which then translates into pressures on parents to buy the technology for their kids.

Adults can take advantage of this power dynamic to make it work for them, to open up the conversation point about technology to introduce “parenting” into the conversation. For instance, you might want to know how kids will react if they get an unidentified caller, or creepy phone message, or skanky video.

On the flip side, when adults are disinterested or disengaged with technology when kids want to show them something that excites them, then kids will stop having the conversation.

It’s important not to deify technology - all the rules about good parenting still apply. Equally, it's important not to ignore technology – keeping yourself informed is a way of adapting positively.

Kids often experience not knowing about things and their response is to go out and learn about it so they can grow and adapt.

As adults, we could learn a lot about at how kids cope with and adapt to change in their own lives.

Gillian Calvert 
NSW Commissioner for Children and Young People

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