Raising my son with technology

While my son Kai isn’t even old enough to hold a phone yet, I’m already worrying about the day he asks for one.

I design software. Therefore I stare at screens all day, and so does my wife. I don’t want us to be the parents who pretend technology doesn’t exist, because it plainly does, because it helps pays for the roof over his head. So the question of how we raise him around technology has been on my mind for a while now.

The thing that scares me most is social media. I’ve seen what it does to attention, to comparison, to just how people feel about themselves. I don’t want him measuring his life against everyone else’s stories/reels/shorts before he’s even worked out who he is as a person.

I want him to be able to talk to people. Real people, in the room, when we’re out and about. I want him to be bored sometimes, and to sit in that boredom instead of reaching for something to fill it (something I can barely do myself).

But I don’t want to swing too far the other way either. If we ban screens entirely, I’m not sure that’s protecting him. Would I just be leaving him unprepared? These tools and systems aren’t going anywhere, and one day he’ll need to use them well. There’s a difference between someone who’s addicted to technology and someone who’s fluent in it, and I want him to be the second thing.

While the news is always flooded with the bad, I know there is a lot of good in there too. The learning apps I’ve seen look fantastic. Would I be foolish to rule all of that out just because the same device also holds things I’d rather he avoid?

So where’s the balance? I don’t know yet. I suspect nobody fully does. I guess many new parents just figure it out as they go along.

I don’t have a rulebook. But if I had to write down where my head is right now, it’d be something like this:

• No social media for as long as we can reasonably hold out.
• Screens for creating and learning before screens for consuming.
• Time outside, and time bored, protected on purpose.
• We model it too. Hard to ask him to look up if we never do.

If you ask me again in a year I bet I’ll probably have changed my mind on half of the above. I don’t think that’s wrong since this isn’t something you solve once.

Wish me luck!