Online Safety is Self-Awareness: Creating Healthy Cultures at Work and at Home

The Perennial Questions of Screen Time and Children’s Health

The impact of digital media on children’s health is well-documented, and it seems that everyday new research reveals the risks of overuse. And yet, we are living in a time where it’s harder and harder to create and maintain boundaries around technology use for both adults and kids. Parents may use screens to wind down at night, and thus children see screen time as a tried-and-true method of self-regulation. Children’s understanding of tech outpaces their parents, so parents aren’t always sure how to talk to their kids about technology or set appropriate boundaries. More and more, online time is an essential element of children’s sense of belonging and connection, and their education as well. In this quickly evolving landscape, how can pediatricians support families in creating internet safety at home? How is internet safety defined, and what does it look like in practice in families’ homes? 

Marissa Maldonado, CEO of Proda Technology, explains that simply creating rules and boundaries around technology use at home is not enough. First and foremost, when it comes to safe technology use, both children and adults need to learn how to practice self-awareness. Maldonado offers her expertise on internet safety from many varied perspectives. She’s the CEO of a Managed IT and Cyber Security Services Company that serves and educates many clients; she’s a small business owner; she’s a critical thinker and (in her words) “a lifelong IT nerd;” and she’s a mom to two young children. 

“It brings me a lot of joy to educate people on something that can be really scary for them,” says Maldonado. “Being able to simplify cyber security and support people is really fun for me. It doesn’t feel like work.” Maldonado explains in digestible terms what the landscape of online safety looks like today, and how both parents and pediatricians can support kids in navigating it safely. In a climate of concern around rapid technology development and use, she offers a breath of fresh air on the positive impacts online connectivity and fluency will have on younger generations, while also acknowledging the very real risks. Most of all, she advocates that we all practice compassion for ourselves as we integrate this relatively new way of connecting to and working with one another.

The Silver Linings of Digital Media Use

While there is so much discussion of the risks of digital media use for kids, Maldonado believes it’s important to talk about why we want to use these technologies in the first place and how they can be supportive in our lives. “There’s so much common sense to the online world,” she begins. “Be aware, don’t be a bully, don’t let social media be a way to validate your self esteem.”

But beyond those essential precautions, Maldonado sees potential. 

“Some people feel horrified when we talk about the future of kids and technology,” she says. “But if we’re doing everything we can as parents to imbue our kids with good values, humanity, being nice to each other, having integrity, if we’re teaching all these core values… our kids can come into this world and code those values into AI generation, to shape positive social movements through social media, and change the world for the better.” 

The online world creates spaces for young people to come together, learn, and organize, regardless of geography. When used well, social media allows people to build cross-cultural empathy beyond what was accessible to older generations. “Being able to have that community hive mind where they can get information rapidly, and then knowing how to validate that information, is super powerful,” Maldonado says. “They can quickly learn what might not be right in the world and seek to course correct.” This phenomenon is exemplified by movements like Tarana Burke’s #MeToo, or the 2020 surge in BLM protests, both catalyzed in large part by Twitter, Instagram, and other platforms.

For teenagers, social media has allowed them to stay connected to their friends’ lives during times of distance, like the COVID-19 pandemic. These young people, adept in online community-building, will be able to deftly navigate an increasingly global, online work environment as they come of age. “The reality is, our world and our workforce is continuously and rapidly changing,” says Maldonado.”There’s a shift in our cultural demands of work life in terms of what young people need to feel fulfilled. Online connectivity will help them spend more time doing what they love outside of work and less time on stuff like commuting. It’s already doing this.”

Maldonado concludes, “I think we need to trust that our children are going to step up the game on what we’re doing with technology. And yes, we need to make sure we’re harnessing their energy for good.” So, how do families and pediatricians help children “harness their energy for good?” According to Maldonado, by teaching internet safety and healthy self-awareness from a young age.

What Is Online Safety?

“Online safety can be achieved through cybersecurity, to a degree, but cybersecurity needs to be accompanied by awareness and culture building,” Maldonado explains. Proda Technology is a cyber securities and IT vendor, and works with EHR companies like PCC. With new clients in the field of pediatrics, Maldonado finds analogies helpful in teaching the basics. “Sometimes with pediatricians I use the analogy of vaccines,” she says. “What do vaccines do? They protect us from viruses. Okay, now let me transition to cybersecurity. These tools protect us from viruses and other nasty diseases that mutate all the time in the online world.” 

“There are many tools out there we can use in terms of cybersecurity,” she continues. Maldonado explains the basics: “You should know where your devices are at all times, and you should make sure you have protective tools installed on all of your devices. That’s like making sure you have locks on the doors of your house,” she says with a laugh. She references helpful tools like Net Nanny that allow parents to limit and monitor children’s media use. But, she cautions, these tools can fall short. “The reality is, kids are so much more adept with tech than their parents,” she says. “They will find a way around the monitoring tools and the family restrictions.” Maldonado continues, “That’s why I believe at its core, internet safety is self-awareness.” 

What does this self-awareness look like in practice? It’s individuals being able to sense when something is “off” in their digital ecosystem. Maldonado says we need to create cultures both at work and at home that allow for people to share if something just doesn’t seem quite right online, or on one of their devices. 

“First off, I tell business owners never to be punitive if an employee makes a mistake online, and I think it’s the same for kids,” she says. “If your employee was surfing on a distracting site, or clicked a bad link, don’t punish them! We need to create a culture where people feel safe sharing things so we can manage whatever breach occurred.” She continues, “Likewise, the worst thing you can possibly do is have your kids be fearful or repercussions so they hold back from telling you something. Same thing in the business world— don’t punish your staff. We have to know patterns, we have to find the canary in the coal mine.” 

“I also believe this is really important to emphasize with teens,” Maldonado says. “Learning to create a healthy relationship with social media is so important for teenagers in maintaining self-esteem and overall health.They need to feel they can openly talk with their parents about how online time is impacting them.”

Creating Online Safety at Home

In the world of cybersecurity, a breach is any event where data is lost, an unauthorized user accesses a system, or there is any kind of loss of control of systems or information. Maldonado explains that “breach” can be a scary word for people, but it’s essential to be prepared for one. “Some IT companies, Proda included, have adopted the philosophy ‘assume the breach,’” Maldonado explains. “We assume it’s going to happen. Assuming the breach helps us to be prepared. This is an important approach from a safety perspective in a home environment as well.”

She explains how this might look at home: “In the home environment, the breach means assume what you least want to occur is going to occur. Then develop a plan to limit the impact if it does happen,” Maldonado says. “Maybe it’s online bullying, your child talking to someone who isn’t who they say they are, your child being exposed to content you wish they hadn’t seen, the list goes on… As you have a conversation about these topics, normalize it so your children are never afraid to have a conversation with you if something isn’t right.”

Maldonado encourages people to have the same conversations about cyber security that they do in their business in their home as well. “Those conversations about acceptable use policies? We should be having those at home,” she explains. “What does acceptable use mean to your family? No laptops in bedrooms? No phones at the table? Find out what that means for you.” 

Just as a business would create an incident response plan for a breach, Maldonado recommends applying this structure to your home. “Create an incident response plan,” she says. An incident could be a kid losing their device, or happening upon an inappropriate website; perhaps a breach hasn’t happened yet, but it’s close at hand. “What is our response if an incident has happened? Do I talk to mom, dad, my teacher? What is our action plan when we know something isn’t right?” Maldonado explains. “Talk about it and write it down.” 

Importantly, Maldonado recommends bringing in kids as experts on all things digital media in the family. “Here’s the most terrifying and also fascinating part,” she says with a laugh. “Your kids probably know more than you when it comes to the internet! It’s good to have monitoring tools in place but sometimes they’re going to out-clever you. You can engage your kids by asking them to teach you what they know about cybersecurity.”

To Monitor or Not to Monitor

Whether or not to monitor children’s texts and online activity is a question that’s challenging for many families. When asked about the question of monitoring, Maldonado offers an example of one of her coworkers, a senior engineer at Proda, and his son. 

“My coworker is always battling with his son, trying to limit his screen time,” she says. “The other night he logged into his family’s network and saw that a new IP was popping up. Long story short, his son was able to get a new device, mask his IP address, and log onto their network!” Maldonado laughs and shakes her head. “I said to my coworker, you’re secretly a little proud aren’t you? It’s cool how savvy our kids can be.” 

She continues, “The moral is, even if we block a certain IP address at bedtime, our kids can get around that. Monitoring is important but you’ve got to complement it with a positive and open culture where you can say, ‘it’s cool that you did this, but why? Can we have a bigger conversation about your screen time needs and use?’”

On the question of monitoring kids’ text messages, Maldonado says it’s highly personal and individual based on what your family needs. Some families might balk at the Big Brother-esque monitoring that is now widely available to parents. And yet, the field of risk online is much larger today than during, say, a Millennial or Gen X childhood, when kids called each other on the family land line and played games on a massive desktop computer that sat immovable in the living room.  

“Ultimately, if they’re living under your roof, if you’re paying for the phone, that data is yours,” Maldonado says. “Just like a CEO needs access to employees’ emails to take care of the organization. It might not be a feature you want to use but it can help you keep people safe when you need information. For example, if your kid didn’t come home last night and you need to see who they were talking to.”

“But,” she adds, “If you’re monitoring your kids texting you also need to be monitoring their apps— Snapchat, Instagram, etc.” Snapchat, Instagram and many other apps famously implemented vanishing message features, making it easy for people to share potentially inappropriate content without it being stored or monitored. While disappearing messages can enhance security for some, the feature can create greater risk for children.

“Healthy culture-building is the first line of defense here, because as we see with Snapchat, there are so many workarounds kids can find,” Maldonado emphasizes.