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A recent rant published on Ad Age echoes the complaints I’ve started to hear from parents who stand by feeling helpless as their bright, young child falls in love with a smartphone.

The argument goes a little something like this.. if you take a kid in the midst of social development and give him or her an iPhone (or an iPod Touch) they will eventually retreat from you and the real world and instead take refuge in a mobile paradise of farting apps and LOLcats. The only recourse, according to this mom? Blackmail in the form of an unpaid phone bill. Yeah, somehow I don’t see that as the ideal way to open the lines of communication. Here are some alternative solutions…

Teach mobile manners Just like with television and video games, parents can and should place limits on tweens and teens’ mobile usage. And not by ranting and raving about minutes when the phone bill comes, but rather by designating times and places where phone use is inappropriate, i.e. during dinner, or homework time. One way to make this strategy especially effective? Practice what you preach. If it’s not absolutely necessary to have your BlackBerry on the dinner table, then put it away.

If you can’t call ‘em, text ‘em I posted about my own parents’ endearingly awkward attempts at text messaging before, but I’ll spell it out here: texting is an effective means of parent-child communication. Rather than forcing your offspring to turn on their voicemail like one parent that was cited in the AdAge piece, reach out in a way that requires the least amount of effort on their part. It may seem like a downgrade for you, but it’s actually a compromise. And I can personally attest, if you start texting more now, you’re more likely to get a phone call later.

Just because they’re not talking doesn’t mean they’re not socializing One of the most frustrating aspects of the article was the lack of understanding about the positive potential of phones/mobile devices that connect young users to their social networks. From the AdAge article:

The smartphone is the perfect activity/toy/drug for tweens and teens who are, as they have always been, so painfully self-conscious it’s hard for them to just hang out.

The statement was meant as a derogatory remark, but it actually resonates with the case psychologist Eric Weinstein, made for mobile as a healthy emotional outlet for tweens and teens. From Weinstein’s Next Great Thing article:

… [kids] interacted with technology to both moderate their moods and access social networks… Consistent with good mental health, they recognized the need to seek help. The more social support a subject was able to access, the less impact stress had on their lives.

All apps are not created equal. It’s true there are plenty of apps out there that kids don’t need and parents won’t like. Farting sounds and cow-shooting are among them. But there is so much more to mobile applications than that (and let it be said that boys liked farting noises and pretending to shoot things long before cell phones even existed). Funny enough, the author compares LOLcats with comics and says the former doesn’t measure up, but really Marvel is in the process of going mobile, as are other progressive youth-targeted publishers. Tweens and teens may not turn their iPhones into e-readers, but parents shouldn’t completely discount digital literacy.

Parents like this one have my sympathy because they just make things so much harder on themselves. By not attempting to meet their kids’ halfway and instead resorting to extreme courses of action like holding the phone hostage, they’re less likely to resolve anything and more likely to get.. the silent treatment.

For more coverage of the latest trends and developments in mobile technology for youth, check out the Ypulse Mobile Channel.

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Categorized under: Mobile

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