Inspiration
Indian parents have to start filling the generation gap with their children but digitally
With the unprecedented pace of the explosion of internet, parents and children are living in virtually 2 different online spheres. Given that the online world is full of torment, shaming, bullying, fake identities and adult content, Indian parents need to learn the art of online parenting too
Imagine this: as an average parent in your 30s or 40s you are generally active on 3 social media portals – Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. If you are the overly social or adventurous kind you may have excitedly downloaded Snapchat too. So you Facebook, Insta, Tweet and maybe Snapchat.
Now imagine this: your kids live on these portals– Yik Yak, ask.fm, Secret, Whisper. Ever heard of them?
These are wildly popular sites which guzzle up most of the free time of pre-teens and teens; these are the global playgrounds where romances bloom, hearts break, friendships begin and wars are won and lost. Heard of otakus, yuri, catfish? These are the names for the kinds of people that your kid encounters online regularly.
In a recent carried out among Indian children in the age group of 8-16 years, 81% that they are active on social network (incidentally, this number is higher than the US and Singapore). We can all agree that for our children, the digital landscape is now their first playground. It is in this digital playground that our children are making friends, negotiating conflicts and perhaps even discovering love.
Technology will offer them vast advantages as they bypass borders, collaborate with people around the world and learn languages of countries that we can’t even place on a map. But it will also make them vulnerable in ways that we, as their parents, are largely unequipped to deal with.
Catfish (raise your antennae please)
Last year, Divya from Bangalore met a girl from Sri Lanka online. The 2 pre-teens would talk for hours with Divya often racing home from school so that she could pick up the threads of conversation with her ‘friend’. They discussed everything under the sun, as friends of that age do – they shared their dreams, fears, crushes, and school politics. It was only months into the friendship that Divya discovered that Samantha was a “catfish”, a popular term that is now used for someone who fakes an online identity. In reality, Samantha wasn’t a real person, she didn’t exist.
Sexting and Dicpics (Here’s where the children need you the most)
In a recent conversation with 15-year-old Pia from Delhi, she shared that she started sexting with her boyfriend in around Class VIII. “Many kids in my class were doing it” she says almost defensively. It is a fact that almost 25% of pre-teens and teens in India share intimate photos and messages online. Pia says that the “game” began innocently – “in the first photo, I was wearing a low-cut shirt and jeans.” The rules of the game became clear – go a step further with every photo. Within a few days, the photos were viral.
“It seemed like there was no one – my family, relatives, and teachers – who hadn’t seen those photos” says Pia. Both Pia and her boyfriend had to undergo months of counselling, but Pia decided to move to Canada in an attempt to escape the aftermath. However, a big step like leaving the country also did not bear fruit as she says, “Strangers still send me those images, sometimes they morph them to look even crazier. The internet follows you everywhere.”
Cyber Bullying
Then there is the spectre of cyber bulling and cyber shaming. A report has revealed that a popular networking site ask.fm has been linked to teenage suicides globally. Jessica Laney, a 16-year-old from the US tragically committed suicide after being viciously bullied on the site with posts including “fat”, “loser” and “kill yourself already”. You know what. She did.
Jessica’s isn’t the only case. There are similar stories strewn across the globe – Ciara Pugsley from Ireland and Amanda Todd from Canada, both teenagers who faced vicious bullying on ask.fm and went on to kill themselves. An elite school in South Mumbai went to the extent of recently banning the site with students facing suspension if they continue to keep their accounts active. While the ban is laudable in its intent, it is ultimately ineffective because the banning of one site simply makes students move to another.
You may wonder what do website managements generally do when such tragedies or extremes are attribute to their membership. It doesn’t always make business sense for the websites to control bullying. As a recent New York Times Op-Ed noted, “[websites] business models depend on high numbers of users, and they may have no reason to ensure those users behave well.” In fact, scandals and slander prop up the popularity of the websites. Monica Lewinsky (from the infamous scandal) says that that she was the first person whose “global humiliation was driven by the Internet”. Lewinsky was 22 when she had to face global barrage of inspection and comments when the scandal broke and now, at 40, she is spearheading a campaign to make the Internet a more humane place. This campaign is asking some pertinent questions; when does this ‘culture of humiliation’ become too much? And how do we support the Internet’s youngest users – our children – to wade through the mountains of anonymous cruel posts, whispers, yiks, tweets, pokes and torment?
The good part is that kids are proactively offering some answers themselves. Trisha Prabhu, a 14-year-old in the US understood the severity of the cyber bullying pandemic after watching reports of teenagers committing suicide because of cyberbullying. She developed an app which notifies a user before they can post a potentially offensive or bullying message and asks if they would like to “rethink” their post. It is a simple and yet elegant solution which is rightly placing the onus of rethinking on the author of a post before publishing it. Dr Shikha Singh, a psychologist, says the teenage brain is still “under construction especially in areas related to judgment and control” and this App makes teenagers pause and think before impulsively pushing the button.
Trisha’s app is definitely a step in the right direction but more help needs to arrive at a faster clip than the spread of this pandemic. Adults need to push for change in 3 areas – corporate, legal and educational. Firstly, at the corporate level, we must demand that companies should be digitally responsible in the same way that they are ecologically and socially responsible. Facebook, Reddit and Twitter have already announced that they will ban revenge porn on their sites. The search giant, Google has said that it will honour requests of victims of revenge porn and remove the sexually explicit images from Google Search results. But this is not enough.
Secondly, strong yet sensible laws to prevent cyber bullying especially for minors should be in place, especially in India as currently there exists a regulatory vacuum. And lastly, the schools need to be current and incorporate cyber safety as essential curriculum. Not as some optional lecture given from an outdated manual but from experts who understand the severity of the situation. The world has changed and our education system must walk with changing times.
But most importantly, it’s time for parents to start doing the homework and mind you this is one difficult assignment. The parents today are perhaps the first who are raising an entirely digital generation and there are no guide books, no maps and no ancient wisdom to rely on. This is unprecedented parenting, but parents have no choice but to measure up.
This post is based on an article originally published here