Neha J Hiranandani – “Our children are born with phones in their hands”
The online lives of ‘digital natives’ are becoming increasingly unrecognisable to their ‘digital migrant’ parents. Here, the author of ‘iParent; Embracing Parenting in the Digital Age’ delves into the fruitful, safe, and healthy ways in which children can relish their online time
What motivated you to write this book?
It’s a strange story. A few years ago, my daughter’s school organised a dress-up day where the kids were asked to dress as an important character who had changed the tide of humanity. I asked my daughter, Zoya, what the popular characters were, expecting to see many kids dressing as Mahatma Gandhi or Mother Teresa. To my mind, these were people who had changed humanity. “Not really mom,” she replied. “A lot of people are dressing up as MrBeast.” When I heard her answer, I realised that we are witnessing a new world order. Our kids are living in a parallel universe from us. Right from what they find interesting to who they find inspirational is different. And so this book became an exploration of their online world, that borderless playground where our kids make friends, negotiate conflicts and discover love. It’s an attempt to join the kids in their web. And incidentally, the kids in my daughter’s school were on to something – (the American YouTuber) MrBeast made the cover of Time magazine!
This incident points to what your book says about the digital divide, doesn’t it?
Absolutely. Our children are born with phones in their hands, they tap and drag before they walk and talk. For us, technology has come later and no matter how good we get at making Insta reels, it will always be our second language. Every day that goes by, we get more plugged out while our kids get more plugged in. As this happens, the “digital divide” between generations widens and so, we’re parenting in a world that we barely understand.
How did your research change your perceptions about the online lives of children?
Well, it certainly made me realise how much we don’t know! There is no precedent in human history for the impact of the internet which means that all of us – parents and kids – are subjects in a massive global experiment. That was one of the frightening realizations. But the research also helped me appreciate the ‘good side’ of tech, for example how it has democratized education and created new internet-only careers. It even gave me an appreciation for how gaming can be a great investment for your kids’ time – an idea that I’ve explored at length in the book.
How differently do parents and children define ‘virtual’ and ‘real’?
As parents of GenZ children, we are the last generation to remember phones that plugged into walls instead of supercomputers that slide into pockets. We are the last of humanity to remember what living, learning and loving was like before the internet. This gives us a unique vantage because we can still differentiate between ‘virtual’ and ‘real’, a line that is increasingly blurred for our kids. I was recently talking to a teenager who was telling me about an argument he had with his girlfriend. I asked him if the fight happened online or face-to-face. “What’s the difference?”, he asked. That’s when I realised that for many in GenZ there is no real difference between ‘virtual’ and ‘real’ – those lines have blurred.
How important is it for a parent to figure out what this blurring boundary between ‘virtual’ and ‘real’ means for their child?
At the beginning of Covid, there was a Coronavirus challenge that went viral. Young people all over the world filmed themselves licking airplane toilet seats and running their tongues over metro handlebars. Not as grotesque, but social media platforms are filled with viral challenges, many of them dangerous. I spoke to a group of teenagers who had performed the cinnamon challenge (eating a tablespoon of cinnamon without drinking anything). “I nearly died,” said one of the boys with a laugh. As a parent, watching our kids do these strange deeds for a few likes is bizarre, even unfathomable. For us, the ‘real’ world rewards matter and that’s why with this growing digital divide; we’re also feeling more disconnected from our kids than ever before. We’re struggling to relate to our kids, their motivations and their online lives. If we are to continue to be relevant in our kids’ world, it’s crucial that we understand that online is very real for our kids. If we don’t recognise this online world, then we can’t help them navigate it. It’s only once we wrap our heads around why they want to eat that tablespoon of cinnamon, that we can make sure they drink a glass of water!
Part of your research involved entering the labyrinth: you played video games with your children, looked in on streamers doing their work, and you also accessed a virtual reality platform. How did that make you feel?
Ancient, at first! But it quickly became empowering. Perhaps most importantly, it allowed me to bond with my kids in entirely new ways as they opened up and showed me their worlds. We’ve gamed together, watched VR shows together and discussed the drama in the comment section together. I went from lamenting “these kids and their phones” to understanding and appreciating how their lives work online. Plus, it’s helped me grow my own vocabulary and learn words like ‘rizz’, ‘delulu’ and ‘shipping’!
Please describe a few tech apps which are currently popular among young people? How do they differ from the apps you and I might use?
Snapchat, BeReal, The Pattern and Locket are all hugely popular right now. But to be honest, it’s not only what apps they’re using but how they’re using these apps that’s different. For example, The Pattern is an astrology app but kids are using it to understand their own identities and find like-minded people. They are living on these apps.
How easy or hard was it for you to have your children open up about this aspect of their lives?
I think most of our children are just waiting for us to ask. What’s better than showing your parents how much they don’t know!
What parts of the lives of children in general are augmented by the apps they use?
If I had to pick one, I would say education. There is, of course, the obvious augmentation from learning languages online to collaborating with lab partners in different continents but there’s so much more. Think about standing in the middle of a room as countless prisms stretch out in every direction creating twisting rainbows of light as you watch science in action – that’s how physics can be taught in the metaverse. I learned refraction as my high school physics teacher held up an object saying “This is a glass made of glass”. The difference is staggering!
You occupy the centre of two extremes of opinion about children having online lives: one, that they must be protected like greenhouse orchids, even to the extent of snooping on them. Or the other, that they are precocious and will themselves learn how to stay safe from online addiction, predatory advances, cyber bullying and other dangers. How does that sound?
Look, we can’t raise our kids to be delicate orchids, obsessing over every website they visit. And yet, we can’t abandon them online without our guidance. Here’s how I think of it: remember how we taught our kids to ride a bicycle? At first, we put on the training wheels and rode alongside them, teaching them the rules of the road and how to watch out for danger. Then slowly, we took off the training wheels and let them ride around the safety of the neighbourhood before eventually letting them loose on the road. I think teaching internet safety is exactly like that; at first we have to ride alongside our kids, watching their online activity and giving them incremental freedom while coaching them on digital hygiene. Once we’ve done that for a while, we can slowly take the training wheels off knowing that they are now equipped to deal with the incoming traffic of the internet, some of which can be aggressive.
Your book mentions that half of Indian children online have engaged in bullying behaviours, which has serious implications for themselves and others. Who, in your opinion, might intervene to reduce the spread of online bullying by Indian children, and are these interventions already happening?
Yes, research indicates that 52 percent of Indian children admit to having bullied others online. That’s a staggering number and when you connect the dots, it turns out that between your home and mine, it’s likely that one of us is raising a cyberbully. When schools find out about this, the situation is often already out of hand and the problem has occurred. As parents, it’s up to us to see the warning signs and intervene. India has one of the highest rates of cyberbullying in the world, and often it’s not strangers but known kids who bully other kids.
A long section deals with how online porn – which is mainly aggressive, exploitation-based, degrading -- is for many children their first major information about sex. In this situation, how important is it for parents and schools to discuss sex with their children?
I think it’s important to accept that porn is embedded into the architecture of the internet. Whether its accidental or deliberate, porn is going to enter your kids online diet. This is likely to happen earlier than you think. In the US, ‘porn’ is the fifth most popular Internet search word for kids aged six and above. In India, the average age for encountering online porn is ten and it’s getting younger. There’s no point in trying to block all porn ever made from our kids’ phones because the truth is that most porn filters will fail. What’s critical is that we speak to our kids because kids have no context for porn. And so many of them start to believe that what they see in porn – the bodies and the acts – is real. We have to contextualize it for them to explain that porn is ultimately performance. And learning about sex from porn is like learning how to drive a car from Fast & Furious! There’s nothing inherently wrong with porn, it’s just that our kids have no context that it is a fantasy.
We’ve created such a culture of silence around sex that many of us misguidedly believe that our children will become sexually active if we talk to them about sex. The research indicates that the exact opposite is true. A child is more likely to delay having sex and to take less sexual risks if they have a parent or caregiver who talks to them about sex. If we don’t talk to kids about sex at home and in schools, their natural curiosity will take over and soon they’ll be typing ‘sex’ into Google to learn more. From there on the algorithm will take over, and the rest is up to your imagination. In this day and age, ‘the Talk’ is not optional, it’s necessary and we must talk to the kids early and clearly!
Why are we, particularly the children among us, ‘hooked in’ by our phones and the apps on them? Are apps designed to keep us using them?
It’s all about dopamine; that’s the secret sauce! In fact, tech companies call dopamine the ‘Kim Kardashian’ of molecules because it makes the apps stick and the dollars tick! Dopamine is a feel-good neurochemical that our brains release in a moment of enjoyment like taking a bite of cake, doing a killer workout or having sex. Once you release the chemical, you want to do that activity again. Social media companies know this and they have simply hacked our neural pathways to release dopamine on cue. So now when you get a heart on your Insta photo, a like on your Facebook post or even a ping of a new Whatsapp notification, your brain releases dopamine. And once you’ve tasted the dopamine, you’re stuck in a compulsion loop – dil maange more. No matter what social media app you are using, dopamine is laced into the product design. Drugs work in a similar way and perhaps, it’s no wonder that we’re all hanging around social media platforms like addicts. We’re hooked to the dope.
One day last year, I used a ‘digital wellbeing’ app which came with my phone to measure my social media usage. It turned out I’d opened a social network app over a hundred times that day, and overall I had used social networks and media for a total of five hours. It must have been a holiday. My actions were reflexive and I can’t recall most of the times I opened the apps. I opened them to get a dopamine surge, and closed them once the desired result was achieved. Does this square with experiences of other social media users?
Absolutely! You’re not alone. Reports suggest that the average person checks their phone 12 times an hour. Many of these checks are Pavlovian in nature. Almost everyone reading this article would have likely checked their phone twice before they reached this sentence. Our phones have become integrated supercomputers, news dispensers, social connectors, entertainment boxes, educators, porn portals and personal secretaries – all in one device. That’s massively convenient and hugely disruptive at the same time. The trouble is that every time we switch from one task to others – say for example, moving from WhatsApp to replying to email to skimming Insta and then switching to a news portal – we lose something. Human beings weren’t built to multitask like this and therefore, the constant switching and foraging for dopamine comes at a cost. The most common manifestation is the brain fog that so many of us are dealing with. WWILF or What Was I Looking For? that’s the question many of us ask ourselves when we are lost in our phones roaming around directionless in that endless space between Whatsapp, social media, news apps and the boss’ email. Most of can’t remember what we had intended to do when we had picked up our phone in the first place.
Speaking of dopamine, you describe the process of being at a party, posting your selfie on a social medium for photos and then checking your ‘likes’ for dopamine hits. How did the dopamine high affect your interactions with people at the party?
Honestly, I was so wrapped in my phone foraging for dopamine hits that I didn’t even want to talk to others at the party. Even when I did interact with them, they just felt so flat because the likes that I was getting on my phone felt so much more interesting – the dopamine surges were greater. The truth is that while we should take individual responsibility for controlling our phone usage, we should also realize that it’s not so easy. There are literally battalions of people on the other side of that phone screen-armed with deep pockets, access to our data, pathbreaking AI and an intimate knowledge of human neurocircuitry – who are hell bent on breaking our self-control. This is where we are in the history of humanity. We should take a moment to recognise it.
You describe some hair-raising experiences and quote some pretty hard-hitting research, yet you sound hopeful. Why?
So much of the online world is new and experimental. Who knows how this experiment will turn out? But in between all this newness, I believe there might be a solution in the old stories. Remember the tale of Goldilocks? Recall how she liked her porridge. Not too hot, not too cold but just right. Hand your toddler a smartphone: the porridge is too hot. Trying to mandate a 100% screen-free life for your tween: it’s too cold. We have to keep stirring the pot and adjusting the temperature as we go along. Ultimately the recipe for your family’s porridge will be your own, seasoned to your taste and adjusted to your family’s preference. But it’s a rare parent that won’t cook for their kids, no matter how difficult the recipe. So bon appetit!
Suhit Bombaywala’s factual and fictive writing appears in India and abroad. He tweets @suhitbombaywala