Welcome Home(s)
Congratulations! You are among the first humans tasked with simultaneously raising kids in both physical and digital worlds. The physical world is, of course, where we all live. It’s the playground we take our kids to, the bus where we sit next to people on the way to work, and the neighborhoods where we ride our bikes. It’s the world our parents raised us in.
But our kids are also growing up in a digital world—a parallel universe we access through computers, tablets, smartphones, and wearable devices. It’s where we go to get our news, order groceries, and meet with our teams as we work remotely.
We have a dual citizenship that allows us to move seamlessly between these two worlds hundreds of times a day without even realizing it. Our kids have no memory of a time when they didn’t have access to both worlds. It has never crossed their minds that there was once a time when you couldn’t buy a skateboard on Amazon or stream episodes of The Mandalorian on a smartphone. Yet, as familiar as the digital world has become, we have put surprisingly little effort into making sure our kids are prepared to be safe and healthy when they’re there. We provide our children with all kinds of preparation to be successful in the physical world. We schedule regular health checkups and encourage them to put on sunscreen and wear helmets. We teach them to play nicely with the other kids at the playground, to ask permission before going to someone else’s house, and say “thank you” when they leave. We teach them to hold the door open for someone carrying bags of groceries, to be considerate of others, and much, much more.
But when it comes to preparing our kids to be successful in the digital world, it’s like the proverbial crickets. With viral misinformation campaigns, cyberbullying, and exploitation of our personal data, we simply cannot afford to be haphazard in this responsibility. Fortunately, we can close this gap and proactively prepare our children to thrive in digital spaces by understanding more about how the virtual world works and applying some surprisingly simple strategies for teaching our kids to use technology as a force for good in their lives.
We Are All Connected
Our digital universe has put us in contact with exponentially more people than someone who grew up in the physical world only. I often think about the difference between the life of my grandfather and that of my son. In 1929, when Salvatore Culatta was just fourteen years old, he boarded the SS Providence and traveled from Palermo, Italy, to New York City. At that time, the number of people he could have interacted with was largely a calculation of how many people lived within a fifty-mile physical radius of wherever he was and how much time he could devote to going new places. Even as phones became more widespread, the telephone generally connected people who already knew each other, so the circle of people my grandpa would have interacted with wouldn’t have grown exponentially throughout his lifetime.
That is not the case for my son, Benjamin Sal (who is named after his great-grandpa), thanks to a little Department of Defense project known as ARPANET. This computer-to-computer network became the backbone of today’s internet in the nineties when Tim Berners-Lee figured out how to use the network to create the World Wide Web. Anyone with a computer and a web browser could now view “pages” stored on internet web servers. The rest, as they say, is history. But today’s internet is about much more than just connecting computers and viewing web pages. This worldwide network is about connecting people to each other without the barriers of time, travel, language, or any of the other constraints that limit people from interacting with each other in the physical world.
At any given point in our day, through the digital world, we are all just a few degrees of separation from anyone else on the planet. Through the internet, my son has the potential to be in contact with as many people in a day as his grandfather had in a year—or some people have had in their entire lifetimes. This exponential access to other people fundamentally shifts the realities and possibilities of the world our children are growing up in. The artificial barrier of physical location will never be a constraint that limits access to who they work with, play with, and learn from.
The Digital Migration
The digital world is also quickly replacing the physical world as the host site for many of our most important daily activities. As the world grappled with the reality of the Covid-19 pandemic, it also led us to reset our expectations for what types of activities we could do as (or more) successfully in online spaces. We have now become a digital workforce, with the majority of professionals reporting to work in the virtual world.1 Medical advice has migrated from doctors’ offices to sites like Healthline.com, and appointments with specialists are conducted virtually through a variety of telehealth apps.2
When we’re in the mood to see a movie or watch our favorite TV show, 75 percent of US households turn to Netflix or other streaming media services for entertainment. By putting on an Oculus headset, we can turn our living rooms into an African safari or the international space station. Thanks to Amazon and its competitors, over 90 percent of the US population is expected to shop online, as everything from prescription glasses to diapers are delivered conveniently to our door by mail and soon by drone.3 Statistically speaking, it’s also much less likely that we will meet our significant other in the physical world, as finding a date has almost entirely migrated to the digital world as well.4 If OkCupid’s twelve sexual orientation categories aren’t specialized enough for us, custom dating sites let us find a farmer (FarmersOnly.com), a sea captain (SeaCaptainDate.com), or even a double date for us and our pet (DateMyPet.com).5
When Covid-19 hit and 1.2 billion students worldwide left brick-and-mortar classrooms, school migrated to the virtual world. Even before Covid-19, the number of college students taking only online courses in the United States was growing by more than 350,000 a year.6 BYJU’S (India’s top online learning site) teaches 35 million students a year, and VIPKid employs over 65,000 US teachers to deliver 180,000 English classes virtually to students in China every day. Informal learning has almost entirely migrated to the digital world as well (86 percent of YouTube viewers say they go there to learn something new).7
Some less obvious but equally transformational migrations to the digital world have also taken place. Ghost kitchens—restaurants with, well, no restaurant—have begun to emerge.8 People place their virtual orders directly with the chefs who prepare the food and then communicate (also virtually) with delivery services like DoorDash that deliver the food to their doorstep. We pay for our meals using virtual banks that, like the ghost kitchens, don’t have any physical presence. In some countries, all financial transactions have already moved entirely to the virtual world, making paper money obsolete. On a recent trip to China, I couldn’t find a single store that would accept a credit card, much less paper money. Retail financial transactions in China take place by scanning a QR code into WeChat (China’s version of Facebook). Homeless people on the streets had QR codes on cardboard signs asking for digital handouts. Around the world, registering to vote—and even voting itself—is shifting into the virtual world.9
Digital migration has been accelerated by unfathomable increases in computing power. The phone in my pocket has 120 million times the processing power of the computers that took the first astronauts to the moon!10 With new networks on the horizon promising increased bandwidth and zero latency (that annoying delay you experience when talking to someone on a video chat), a whole host of additional activities will soon migrate to the virtual world. We will soon be able to go to a local orchestra concert where the guest conductor is joining by holograph from anywhere in the world. Today, to undergo an appendectomy, you must be physically in the same room as the doctor, which limits the availability of lifesaving medical attention. With next-generation wireless networks, telesurgery will enable doctors to operate remotely from anywhere in the world. Technology brings an unprecedented level of convenience and personalization, and it will allow our children to do more, learn more, create more, and connect more than any of us could have ever imagined.
The migration from the physical to the digital world represents a fundamental shift in the lives of our children. The events that take place in the virtual world are not ancillary to their lives but are some of the most important elements of them. The limitations of the physical world will not shape or constrain the design of our children’s life events the way they did mine or yours.
Houston, We Have a Problem
Despite the limitless possibilities, there is a dark side to the digital world my son—and all of our children—has access to. For all the good the virtual world has to offer, it is also filled with some wicked problems. Most of them stem from one fundamental flaw: we never took the time to establish the ground rules for meaningful participation. We have spent the last two decades excitedly finding ways to migrate all kinds of experiences to the digital world, but we haven’t stopped to ask how we will preserve our civil society as it also migrates there. With no expectation for acceptable behavior and near-complete anonymity, we have created an environment that is optimized for self-destruction.
We need to commit to establishing expectations for meaningful and civil online behaviors that will allow our children to not only be their best selves online, but bring out the best in others as well. I refer to the attributes and norms for responsible and healthy behavior in virtual spaces as digital citizenship. Effective digital citizens are those who know how to engage respectfully with other members of the virtual world and use technology to improve their digital and physical communities. If we can’t figure out how to create a generation of positive, productive, and civil online inhabitants, our amazing parallel universe will eventually turn into one in which none of us will want to live—and it will be too late to migrate back. The consequences of getting it wrong are disastrous and irrecoverable. The goal of this book is to start a new conversation to help our kids thrive in virtual spaces—to teach them to become contributing digital citizens who can positively shape the virtual world and the activities within it. This book is the user’s guide for the digital world that we never created.
We’ll begin in chapter 1 by identifying four digital dysfunctions that affect how we operate in digital spaces, exploring the risks of not addressing these key problems. Chapter 2 then looks at the issues with our current way of teaching online expectations to children, both what we’ve gotten wrong so far and what we can do about it. It makes the urgent case that teaching online safety isn’t enough; we need a more comprehensive approach to creating future digital citizens. Chapters 3 through 7 then break down that approach by discussing five practical digital citizenship skills that all kids need to learn: being balanced, informed, inclusive, engaged, and alert. Finally, in the remaining two chapters, we will meet the other members of our team and what we can expect the digital world to look like in the future.
As I point out some of the dysfunction that exists in our virtual world, I wouldn’t blame you if your gut reaction is to bury all of your family’s mobile devices in the backyard. There are certainly others who suggest taking that route. I recently learned about a movement that encourages parents to pledge to keep their children off any devices until eighth grade. Some claim to have heard that Silicon Valley tech CEOs won’t let their own kids use technology (as far as I can tell, that idea comes from a misinterpreted interview with Steve Jobs from a decade ago).11
Yes, digging the hole in the backyard might make us feel better in the short term, but it also takes away the opportunity for our children to learn good habits at a young age. It’s a bit like saying we should not teach our kids to read in order to keep them from being exposed to hate speech. Cutting children off from devices entirely can actually increase the risks and dangers, as they lose important opportunities to develop healthy digital habits. To become lifelong learners, provide for their families, and become leaders of our civil society, our children must learn how to responsibly use digital tools from a young age. The problem isn’t the technology; it’s that we haven’t established the right expectations for participation in the digital world. Establishing expectations for our kids and holding tech platforms accountable for creating healthy online communities is harder than digging that hole. But it is one of the most important things we can do as parents to ensure a healthy and happy future.
Meet Your Tour Guide
My journey with technology started as a nerdy kindergartner when my mom decided we should get an Apple IIe computer so I could learn the skills of the future. Because of her job at the University of Rhode Island, I also got access to Gopher and Telnet—early versions of the internet—which opened my mind to the possibility of connecting with experts anywhere in the world at the click of a button. Fast-forward a bit and I found myself working in the US Senate, where I saw how that same technology I played with as a kid could bring the voices of constituents right into our offices in Washington, DC. Years later, as the chief innovation officer for my home state, I again turned to technology to make college more accessible, our cities safer, and to transform our students into problem-solvers, by becoming the first state to teach computer science in every school.
In 2012, President Obama appointed me to lead the Office of Educational Technology for the US Department of Education. While serving in the Obama administration, I saw firsthand how tech could make it easier for first-generation college students to plan and apply for college, increase veterans’ access to medical benefits, and identify potential terrorists before they could harm our country. My role gave me the opportunity to work closely with the world’s largest tech companies. I’ve had a unique behind-the-scenes view of technical capabilities that make me proud to be human. In my current role as the CEO of the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), a nonprofit serving educators in a hundred countries, my work is focused on using technology to make sure all students have access to high-quality learning opportunities adapted to meet their individual needs.
My wife, Shaundra, and I have four wonderful children, and we are fortunate to rely on lessons we learned from our own parents as we try to teach teach our kids to make good decisions, be respectful to others, and follow good examples. Despite having spent my career at the intersection of tech and learning, we realized how entirely unprepared we were to help our own children develop the skills they needed to thrive in the virtual world. When it came time for the “birds and the bees” talk, we laughed at the memory of the awkward moment when our parents tried to explain where babies come from, but even that cringey memory provided a baseline for us to improve on and adapt as we try to teach our kids the same thing.
Parents and teachers don’t have any baseline for preparing our kids to be effective digital citizens. Many books and blogs seem more focused on shocking us with the dangers of technology than providing strategies for how to teach our kids to use tech to enrich their lives. Books like The Boogeyman Exists: And He’s in Your Child’s Back Pocket or The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future frighten us and ignore the consequences of not teaching our kids to use tech for good. None of the evidence that we observed in raising our own kids, or that I’ve seen as I’ve worked with education systems worldwide, would suggest that technology is making our kids dumber; in fact, I’ve found exactly the opposite to be true.
As I’ve talked to parents, I quickly discovered my wife and I aren’t alone. This fueled my journey to find strategies that can help parents and teachers set up their kids for success. This book is for parents, community leaders, and educators who can use some thoughtful insights on how to raise amazing kids in the evolving digital world. There may be moments as you are reading that the thought may pop into your mind, “I wish I had known these ideas earlier. Now that my kids are older, is it too late to start?” Let me state now that it is never too late to change a family’s digital culture. Of course, certain principles are easier to put in place before a child has spent much time in the digital world or before they receive their first smartphone. But even if your children have been online for some time, it is not too late to rethink the way you are preparing them to thrive in the virtual world. Whether you’re a parent or teacher to toddlers, tweens, teenagers, or some age in between, you can apply the tools in this book to shape your children into healthy digital citizens—and even learn to apply them to improve your own digital habits.
When thinking about adapting and changing a school’s or family’s digital culture, it is important to do it with your kids and not to them; involve older kids, who will have suggestions based on habits developed from their own digital experiences. Talk about why it is important to practice being an effective digital citizen. Help them see the difference they can make in their life and the lives of others based on their behaviors in the virtual world. Identify the good and bad elements of your existing family culture when it comes to using technology (what do you do well as a family; where are you weaker?). Identify concerns that they may have about making changes (e.g., how will I wake up on time if my phone isn’t next to my bed?). Changing culture doesn’t happen in a single talk, but in an ongoing conversation. And remember that just because you are getting input from your kids, there can still be elements of your family culture that you determine as nonnegotiable as well.
My goal is for us to start a new conversation about raising kids in a digital world, one that we should have been having for a long time. Not a conversation based on fear or avoiding technology, but on applying the good parenting and teaching skills we’re already familiar with from the physical world to ensure success for our kids in the virtual world. If we do it right, we will create a better future for them and us, and we’ll look back on our efforts with pride and toward the future with hope.