CHARLOTTESVILLE — Make good choices. Use common sense. Find a healthy balance.
That’s the advice a local police detective offered a crowd of about 70 who turned up at Eastern Hancock High School Thursday night hoping to learn more about how their families could use technology more safely.
Following a screening of the film “Screenagers” — a documentary that explores what it’s like to grow up in the digital age — a panel of law enforcement officers and mental-health experts discussed the issues with technology they see most commonly in their work with local kids.
Sgt. Bridget Foy, a detective with the Hancock County Sheriff’s Department who specializes in investigating crimes involving children, said technology has more regularly played a role in the criminal cases landing on her desk. Just last year, she said, she was “overloaded” with investigations of alleged child-pornography possession; and more often than not the suspect was a high school or middle school student who had a lewd cellphone picture of a classmate, never realizing they could get in legal trouble for possessing the image.
So, talking with kids about safe technology use is important, Foy and the other panel members told the crowd of parents, teachers and a few kids.
Parents should also try to understand why and how their kids are using their devices; and to help their kids to identify when feel they need their phones or tablets versus when they just want them, the panel members said.
When they find boundaries or rules that work for their family, parents should stand firm in enforcing those rules and be prepared to follow them themselves.
And when they set out to have those chats with their kids, Foy suggested parents keep these three simple messages in mind: make good choices, use common sense and find a healthy balance.
The film “Screenagers” aims to spark these kinds of conversations — about how to set technology boundaries and limit screen time — within families. Local educational and health care leaders hoped bringing the film to Hancock County for a free screening would help ignite those talks among parents and kids here.
The movie was brought to Eastern Hancock by Courtney Hott, an Eastern Hancock Schools counselor, thanks to a grant from Hancock Health.
Filmmaker Dr. Delaney Ruston began study the impact of technology on children’s lives when she became concerned with her own children’s addiction to devices. She soon learned the average kid spends 6.5 hours a day looking at screens at home and at school, according to the film’s website.
Throughout the hour-long film, families from across the country — both parents and kids — talk about the impact increased and ever-changing technology has had on their lives, discussing both positive and negative examples.
Interspersed with these real-life stories were academic and medical experts who have studied the impact tech has had on kids’ brains, their academics, health and relationships with family and friends.
The audience also watched as Ruston and her husband struggled to craft technology-use contracts with their two children. The crowd saw the arguments that ensued, the goals that were set and the compromises that were reached.
At the end of the film, Ruston explains a few of the changes their family has made since embarking on this boundary-setting journey.
For example, they’ve made all their school-day car pools tech-free to encourage conversations; striven to find more outdoor activities so they’re less tempted by screens; and they’ve scheduled a weekly dinner discussion about technology, ensuring their talks about boundaries are ongoing.
When the screening at Eastern Hancock was over, the crowd was given an opportunity to ask questions of a panel of local experts.
The panel included: Foy, who has worked in the sheriff’s department since 1995; Josh Sipes, Hancock County’s chief probation officer, who has worked in the local juvenile probation department for nearly two decades; Kara Cole, an assistant program director at The Landing Place, an at-risk youth center in Greenfield; Alexandria Petry, a licensed mental health counselor who works as a school-based therapist locally; and Madison Hamblin, the guidance counselor at Eastern Hancock Elementary School, who worked with the Indiana Department of Child Services’ human trafficking unit for four years before making the switch to education.
Petry, Cole and Hamblin talked about the psychological issues they often come across in their work with kids. Anxiety, depression and lack of self-esteem — often fueled by troubles online — top the list, they say.
Cole told a story about a girl she worked with at The Landing Place who had been receiving threats from classmates via text and messenger apps. It’s troubling that students have to face such things, and it’s not as easy to escape as parents might believe.
“I’m only 33, but we weren’t doing that when I was in high school,” Cole said.
They encouraged parents to seek help from school guidance counselors or places like The Landing if they feel their kids’ tech-use is out of control or unhealthy. It’s never too late to make changes or teach kids about better behavior, they said.
Foy and Sipes told the crowd about the legal issues even kids can themselves in because of technology.
After the influx of juvenile probation cases involving sexting last year, the law enforcement community worked to put a new program in high school health classes that taught kids about the laws they might be breaking if they engage in such behavior, Foy and Sipes said.
They encouraged parents to utilize parental-control settings; and warned about apps that can block and hide content. They reminded the kids gathered that technology always leaves a footprint. Even messages that seem to disappear — they referenced the social media app Snapchat, specifically — can be recovered with the right tools and a search warrant. Then, those messages can be used as evidence in a criminal case.
Sipes encouraged parents to start a dialogue with their kids, not just about technology use but about how technology effects them.
Asking kids about the devices they’re using, about the apps and games they’re playing — and expressing genuine curiosity rather than skepticism — can promote communication, Sipes said. Making them part of the rule-setting process and helping them understand why such rules are being set will make kids more receptive of following those rules.
“Love and consistency is the only thing you owe your kids,” Sipes told parents in the crowd. “They’ll come to respect those boundaries.”