“What is an NMK?” Deacon Marques Silva asked a room of parents. “Not my kids,” he answered, quoting a phrase he often hears from parents.
Parents want to believe that their child or teen is being safe and transparent about their smartphone habits. But those assumptions — and a lack of technology boundaries — put kids at a high risk of running into inappropriate online content and developing problematic behaviors or even addictions, he said.
Deacon Silva, director of the diocesan Child and Youth Protection and Victim Assistance office, informed parents on the reality of children and teen smartphone use at a Nov. 13 talk, “Parenting in a Digital Age,” at St. Leo the Great Church in Fairfax. He tackled topics ranging from smartphone parental permissions to generative AI to social media risks and the harsh realities of pornography among teens.
The first step to keeping kids and teens safe is to implement parental controls and install a management application such as “Our Pact” on their devices, he said. Apple recently published a guide on how to enact parental controls on your child’s device through the Screen Time app. Parental controls can prevent app store downloads, graphic web content, and changes to privacy settings, should a child try to manually change settings.
When it comes to AI, it’s important to note that there is a difference between older forms of artificial intelligence — like Google translate — and generative AI, he said. “Generative AI is not evil,” but if left unregulated, can quickly spin out of control and harm users’ mental health, particularly teens’.
Deacon Silva pointed to recent news reports of teens dying by suicide after using AI chatbots to discuss mental health issues. For the most part, AI chatbots will not push back against a user’s opinions or beliefs, including paranoid or harmful thoughts. This is due to an “argumentative feature” within many AI models that is turned off, he said. According to an October report from OpenAI, which owns the popular ChatGPT generative AI app, “0.15% of users active in a given week have conversations that include explicit indicators of potential suicidal planning or intent and 0.05% of messages contain explicit or implicit indicators of suicidal ideation or intent.” At the beginning of October, OpenAI surpassed 800 million users weekly.
Deacon Silva attended a recent conference at which media and AI industry leaders were present. During one talk, attendees listened to teen perspectives on using AI chatbots. “They felt safer (talking) with AI than they did with the adults,” he said. “They had no problem saying, ‘We don’t want to talk with you.’ ”
Following the suicide reports, industry leaders abroad have been working to update their chatbots to encourage users to reach out to a professional. But parents must stay up-to-date on the dangers of generative AI by consulting industry watchdogs, such as the Family Online Safety Institute, Deacon Silva said.
He added that similar to generative AI, social media presents ever-evolving dangers for kids and teens online. Children who frequently use social media are likely to develop a dopamine addiction, which leads to problematic behaviors, he added. “One of the challenges with dopamine addictions is it flattens the prefrontal cortex,” which controls motivation and impulse control.
What many NMK parents don’t realize, he continued, is that many smartphone apps put their children at risk of exposure to and addiction to pornography, including dating apps and Snapchat, which allows users to send photos that may be viewed once before disappearing. Less obvious are “hiding apps” that allow teens to hide photos and videos, such as the “Calculator” app, which is different from a smartphone’s default calculator app. “Calculator does operate as a calculator, but it also saves photos 17 levels down in encoding and does not use normal imaging extensions like JPEG, PNG,” he said. The app also requires a six-digit password to access the photos.
The age at which children are first exposed to pornography keeps decreasing, Deacon Silva told the parents. He referenced a 2017 report from USA Today, which stated that children as young as 5 are viewing porn. And it’s not just at school where children and teens are exposed. “We find that most teens who are looking at something inappropriate on their phone — they’re within 10 feet of an adult,” he said, adding that 79% of accidental exposure happens while a child is at home.
The largest consumers of pornography are children aged 12-17, and around 67% of children admit to clearing their internet activity, Deacon Silva said. Pornography today is not like a centerfold decades ago, he added; around 52% of teens report viewing violent forms of pornography, including depictions of rape.
The prevalence of porn requires parents to have conversations with their children and teens about sex and the proper names of body parts in an age-appropriate manner: “Teach them, or their friends will.” Just one exposure to porn may shape their expectations of sex for years to come, he said.
Deacon Silva said that conversations with teens about porn exposure should follow the Socratic method rather than a reactionary approach. Parents should ask questions such as, “How often or long did you view this? What did you view? How did you feel afterward?” Designating certain areas of the house as phone-free zones may also be helpful, including bedrooms, the dining room and bathrooms.
Smartphones and the internet are realities of modern-day life, but that doesn’t mean a child should receive a tablet or smartphone as soon as possible, he said. “Social media and the internet are not evil. It can be a great source of creativity … But in order to give life, it needs to have boundaries,” he said.
Parents left with a new sense of urgency to address this topic with their kids. Viviana Gonzalez, a parishioner of St. Ambrose Church in Annandale, said she has two children aged 13 and 16. While her 16-year-old has a phone, “my youngest doesn’t have one yet, so I’m hoping to be more knowledgeable.” Gonzalez said that she plans to chat with her kids about boundaries for internet and social media use. “It’s a process,” she said. “I’ll talk to them about it, and of course, have more vigilance on their phone use.”
Find out more
For the Family Online Safety Institute, go to fosi.org.
The next “Parenting in a Digital Age” talks are at St. Veronica Church in Chantilly Dec. 2 at 7 p.m. and St. Patrick Church in Fredericksburg Jan. 10 at 10 a.m.
