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instead we teach responsible cell phone use consistent with our other behavior expectations.

The real way technology challenges us is the impact of misbehavior. The scope and reach is immediate and vast. An infraction that in the analog world would constitute a small gaff can become a full blown media incident in our digital age. What technology has done is taken the social consequences and amplified them beyond the capacity of many of our students to comprehend.  It’s taken what historically has been pretty low price tag infractions and inflated them at a rate many of us are unprepared to deal with. Consequences we engineer should teach.  The consequences brought about by the ramifications of misuse of technology often do not teach. They often do damage. We really have very little control of the coarse reaction the world drops on our children.

mentors are more likely than limiters to talk with their kids about how to use technology or the Internet responsibly—something that half of mentors do at least once a week, compared to just 20 percent of limiters.

They’re also the most likely to connect with their kids through technology, rather than in spite of it

children of limiters who are most likely to engage in problematic behavior: They’re twice as likely as the children of mentors to access porn, or to post rude or hostile comments online; they’re also three times as likely to go online and impersonate a classmate, peer, or adult.

once they do get online, limiters’ kids often lack the skills and habits that make for consistent, safe, and successful online interactions. Just as abstinence-only sex education doesn’t prevent teen pregnancy, it seems that keeping kids away from the digital world just makes them more likely to make bad choices once they do get online.

While limiters may succeed in fostering their kids’ capacity for face-to-face connection, they neglect the fact that a huge chunk of modern life is not actually lived face-to-face. They also miss an opportunity to teach their children the specific skills they need in order to live meaningful lives online as well as off—skills like compensating for the absence of visual cues in online communications; recognizing and adapting to the specific norms of different social platforms and sub-communities; adopting hashtags, emojis, and other cues to supplement text-based communications; and learning to balance accountability with security in constructing an online identity.

We can’t prepare our kids for the world they will inhabit as adults by dragging them back to the world we lived in as kids. It’s not our job as parents to put away the phones. It’s our job to take out the phones, and teach our kids how to use them.