Page 205 - Resources and Support for the Online Educator

Household Guidelines • Chapter 7

messages/videos online” or “We will not overshare online” need to be put in
place as well for the family.

Texting Immediacy Scenario
Your 11-year-old daughter has just gotten her first cell phone and is respectful
of the texting rules of the house. She doesn’t text all day and night, nor does
she start drama. However, she’s run into a problem where she expects imme-
diate feedback from friends when she sends them a text. She sends one friend a
message and when she doesn’t get a response, she sends several other messages
over an hour’s time and eventually starts to cry because she thinks her friend
is ignoring her.

Without household guidelines solution:
This baffles you as a parent, and you aren’t quite sure if there is a problem with
the friend or not. You tell your daughter to be patient, but she’s already beside
herself. You end up calling the parent of the other child, only to learn that they
have a “no texting during homework or dinner” rule in their house, which is
why she wasn’t responding.

With household guidelines solution:

Teaching empathy can be a hard thing for teens or tweens. They sometimes
get so wrapped up in themselves that they can’t imagine what the person on
the other end of the line is doing. Knowing this, you work with your daughter
ahead of time and create a guideline before she gets her cell phone: She needs
to not only be respectful of her friends’ rules, but also empathetic to their
actions and not jump to conclusions.

This is a scenario that a close friend of mine stumbled on. It wasn’t something
she had considered, but in a world where immediacy of communication seems
to be commonplace, there are emotional repercussions to not getting imme-
diate feedback. When our kids are young, we stress the importance of others’
personal physical space. We also need to know be cognizant of their personal
virtual space and have a sense of awareness that not all kids follow the same
rules or have the same access as others.

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