Kids know the apps, and parents know the people
Heitner starts from a gap she saw in her workshops. Kids are fluent with devices, and parents assume that fluency means they have nothing to teach. She argues the opposite. A 12-year-old can set up a group chat in seconds, and still has no idea what to do when the chat turns on a friend. That second skill is social, and parents have decades of practice at it.
Devorah Heitner. Photo from devorahheitner.com.
An app cannot do the mentoring for you
"If an app is your only tool for managing your child's digital world, it will fail you," Heitner writes. Filters and parental controls have a place, but the book's tools are conversations and modeling. Ask your kid to approve a photo before you post it. Say out loud why you are putting your phone away at dinner. Talk through the unwritten rules: you do not text someone 50 times in an hour because they have not answered, and you do not follow strangers.
She is generous about games and media kids love. When a kid wants a game about stealing cars, her move is to ask what makes it fun (the speed, the chase) and then talk about what is different in real life, rather than shut the talk down.
Making beats scrolling, and parents can join in
Heitner pushes families toward creating together: film a short movie, try some coding, edit a video with a soundtrack. A parent who builds something with a kid on a screen is mentoring, not only supervising, and the kid gets a reason to see the device as a tool.
The Routledge second edition, from the publisher's Amazon page.
The weak spot is structure, and the questions make up for it
One early chapter is titled "The Kids Are Alright," which sets the tone: no shaming, no panic. The ParentingDigital review found the book more of a mind shift than a step-by-step plan, with some topics coming back several times. If you want screenshots of how to set up controls on a phone, this is not that book. The questions at the end of each chapter are where the work happens; read one chapter at a time and talk the questions over with your co-parent.
Heitner's site has a free "How Screenwise Are You?" quiz that works as a quick self-check before you start.
Watch her make the case
Heitner's TEDxNaperville talk walks through what raising a digital native looks like, and why mentoring works better than surveillance:
Her second book is for the teen years
Seven years later Heitner wrote Growing Up in Public, about privacy, reputation and tracking once kids are posting for real. It picks up where this one leaves off. For a research-first look at the same ages, Katie Davis's Technology's Child carries a blurb from Heitner on its jacket.
