Navigating the Changes that Came with Our Daughter’s New Smartwatch

I had been using email for seventeen years before I opened my inbox to what no one ever wants to experience: a flood of spam.

Upon discovering the inconvenience, I spent the next 24 hours trying to unveil the culprit. How had these pesky nuisances found their way in? Unable to identify the cause, I continued receiving hundreds of promotional emails from companies I hadn’t subscribed to. 

If you’ve ever had a problem with spam, you know the frustration. An outside force I hadn’t invited in was tainting one of my primary means of communicating with the world. 

Sometimes, the digital age feels like an invasion of my hopes and dreams for what parenting ought to be like. 

Raising children is hard enough, but raising them in the digital age feels like being spammed by influences outside our control. 

Just take my child’s experience with a smartwatch. My youngest daughter had just hit a milestone in her life: the moment she declared she was too old to play with Barbies. While this may seem small, the moment represented something much bigger: the point in my daughter’s childhood when imagination was no longer the primary lens through which she saw the world. Tear. 

With December well on its way, my husband and I still hadn’t figured out a wow-factor gift for my daughter. I lamented that Christmas would come and go, and Barbie—with her chicken coup full of chickens who laid plastic eggs (seriously, so fun!)—would remain hidden in our closet. After all, Jeness was adamant that we didn’t get her any Barbies for Christmas (and made us announce it to everyone else in our family, too). 

In all this, our neighbor suggested we get Jeness a watch that can make calls and send messages to a small list of family and friends. All the neighbor friends had one, and besides, Jeness was a little hesitant to make the trek back and forth between neighbors’ houses solo for fear of “kidnappers.” This mini walkie-talking on her arm would be the perfect solution for all those neighborhood adventures.

Our neighbors assured us this kid’s version of a smartwatch had not caused their children to be addicted. Still, I hesitated to introduce another form of technology to our already tech-saturated lives. I didn’t want Jeness to become reliant on the little beeping square attached to her wrist. 

Parenting in the world of ever-advancing technology can make us feel like one wrong move will introduce a host of new problem behaviors and unwanted habits in our kids. This fear comes from a place of reality: the introduction of new technology often does have a trickle effect on our family culture, leaving us with undesirable parent-child conflict we didn’t necessarily see coming or aren’t sure how to avoid.

Just like when I gave out my email address to one wrong person, resulting in spam, my kids’ tech use often leaves me wondering how I can retrace my steps and minimize the damage done.

So, after a couple of days of our daughter and her neighbor friends spamming our dinner-time conversation via the watch, our family devised some rules surrounding her new technology. Just like us older people come to the dinner table without our phones in hand, we showed our daughter how to silence her watch before she sat down to her chicken and rice casserole. And we told her the reason why.

We also spent time together devising a contract with other best practices for using her watch, all with an end goal in mind: that the watch would provide greater connection with her friends in this new season of her childhood while also maintaining the best of relationships with those in our home. 

Since most of what I write is in the digital parenting space, I’m a bit embarrassed to tell you that we bought the new-to-us technology before creating the plan for how it would benefit and not harm our family environment. But I’m coming before you with honesty and vulnerability so that you, too, can show up to this digital parenting life with the grace and truth of Jesus toward yourself and your family members.

We are all learning this digital parenting thing one step at a time. And hey, it’s never too late to backtrack and realize you didn’t get it quite right. You and your kids will benefit from having a mom or dad who embraces a growth mindset—one that says,

I may not have gotten it right today, but I can try again tomorrow.

-or-

I may have made a decision that wasn’t quite right for our family, but we can pivot and find what works for us. 

Parenting is a journey. When you troubleshoot one aspect of your family’s relationship with tech, another inevitably appears at your doorstep.

That’s why it’s so important to have a community of fellow moms and dads learning how to be digital parents one messy day at a time. Who is your community? 

What are you wrestling with in the digital parenting space?

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We hope you enjoyed reading this post from our partner and new friend, Jenna Kruse. You can read more posts like this one at SomethingLikeScales.com.