Parents, keep up with your techno-savvy kids

REVIEWED BY ROBYN SASSEN

Tech-savvy Parenting: A Guide to Raising Safe Children in a Digital World by Nikki Bush and Arthur Goldstuck (2014: Bookstorm, Johannesburg)

It’s a frank, sometimes chilling, sometimes hilarious, never foolish foray into the values and horrors of the digital world and offers pragmatic guidelines on how to rein it in.
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Both writers are parents; both have the expertise, humour and savvy to offer insights into all aspects of the Internet generation, from babyhood. The book covers everything from the initiatives of young tech entrepreneurs Nadav Ossendryver with his Latest Sightings app and Tanya Meyer who wrote a Teen Guide to School iPad Use, to the Internet’s sinister face, evident in realities like Outoilet and the rapidity with which an innocent prank can turn viral.

Not without its own poetry, the publication is highly readable yet text-bookish. In each chapter, both authors’ opinions cleave together smoothly with that of other experts in explaining how computers have brought our world irrevocable change. Each chapter concludes with a summation, which is hard hitting in its focus on how children can run amok, screen in hand, because of adults’ ignorance toward the medium.

Bush and Goldstuck do not pull punches in describing the horror of “losing your child down the rabbit hole of technology”, and the value of “tilling the fields of the hearts and minds of your child”.

They write of “talking a child clever”, singing the praises of commonsense in parenting involving reading to children, listening to them, and buying into technology in more ways than just financially. If your child is playing on Facebook, Snapchat or twitter, if he’s Mxiting or cavorting around with an iPhone, you need to too, and be able to understand, and refract the medium’s dark sides.

The book is peppered with a tweet-like beat, but it is never cheap in its articulation of real values. For instance, “one mind, one body, one reputation” encapsulates what a child must protect. “Stop, block and tell” a play on the “stop drop and roll” dictum in a fire emergency, is a strategy to adopt in online bullying or unwittingly slipping into clutches of ever-present sexual predators in social networks, hiding behind fabrications.

Replete with a section addressed to 13-18-year-olds and a dictionary of popular acronyms, ranging from the benign FOMO (fear of missing out) to alarmingly sexually explicit ones, the book contains a cell phone contract between your 13-year-old and yourself and a fascinating section on how the world interferes in a child’s developmental needs.

It is exhaustive in reach, but so succinctly constructed and thought through, that it is a bible-like must have in any household where children and computers co-exist.