Devorah Heitner, who runs the Raising Digital Natives program in Chicago, has two recent great posts about her workshops with kids. As she explains,

I do a lot of classroom work with students about navigating friendships and social interactions in the digital age. My favorites might be 4th and 5th graders—they are often aware of the problems, and have a genuine desire to come up with solutions. They are kind, creative, and collaborative—a real pleasure!

So how do you tap into that desire?

I conduct a fun exercise in my workshops—I have kids design an app. First, we brainstorm a list of everyday issues with technology. Then I break them into small groups and task them with building a quick prototype of an app that addresses one of the problems we identified.

The result is twofold. Not only do the apps they developed tell us a lot about how kids experience one another and their parents’ communication via devices, but they also help kids think through and understand the issues. Imagine the next time they encounter one of these issue in real life. They will be well equipped to address it—or even avoid it!

In an exercise in which she had kids design apps for managing parents’ smartphone usage, this happened:

Kids understand that smartphone technology—and the connection that comes with it—makes demands on our attention. How many times have you seen a parent focused on the “second screen” while a child tries to get his/her attention? It’s easy to spot when it’s another parent, but be honest—have you done this before? As mindful as I try to be, I know that I am guilty at times. And this is a big issue for kids.

The most common solution to this issue that the kids “designed” was a voice recognition app that temporarily disables the parent’s phone if the child is speaking in the same space. If your child is speaking in proximity to you, it disables texting, social media, and phone calls. If you are talking on the phone, it gives you an indication to end the call.

As I mentioned recently, I think it’s now time to start our conversations with kids and teens about their online lives not with the assumption that they’re all dopamine and hormone-driven zombies whose under-mylenated prefrontal cortexes prevent them from being able to think about the consequences of their actions, nor with the assumption that as “digital natives” they know more than their parents. At least for the wiser (or perhaps simply more privileged) kids, assuming that you can harness their enthusiasm, and show them how to address problems they know they have, may work better.