This informative presentation has two primary aims. First,to expose parents to digital age dynamics that may be effecting childrens\' development and second, to introduce the benefits of adapting traditional parenting paradigms to include digital age factors.

1. Developmental Considerations and Decision-Making
Jack and Jill of America, Inc. Southeastern Region
Mothers’ Workday
October 20, 2012
Presenter: Susan Hughes May, Ph.D.

2. AGENDA
 Inspiration for Workshop
 Characteristics of The Digital Age
 MRI Insights into Brain Development
 Digital Culture: Celebration and Concern
 Development of Identity, Autonomy, and Trust
 Impact on Parent-Child Relationships
 Parent Development and Adult Development
 What, if Anything, Remains The Same?

3. INSPIRATION FOR WORKSHOP
Increasingly many parents and their children present
to my practice in crisis, with a breakdown in
communication, a high level of conflict, and a clear
decline in functioning. They are caught in an
unproductive power struggle and at high risk of
further negative consequences. Yet….
 They have functioned well in many areas in the past
 They do not meet any DSM-IV diagnoses
 They have not had any recent trauma or loss

4. INSPIRATION FOR WORKSHOP
 The children are often in the midst of
navigating a developmental transition
 Well intentioned and intelligent parents are
operating from a traditional paradigm that
does not reflect key digital age factors

5. THE MORE THINGS CHANGE,
THE MORE THEY REMAIN THE SAME
…OR DO THEY?
 As was true for their parents, today’s parents have a
generational obligation to prepare their children for
adulthood and optimal societal functioning
 Children depend upon parents to provide the growth
experiences, emotional base, principles, and values
that will lead to a healthy and productive future
 Children continue to benefit when expectations are
clearly conveyed, required, and supervised by parents

6. THE MORE THINGS CHANGE,
THE MORE THEY REMAIN THE SAME
…OR DO THEY?
 Due to digital culture, neurological,
cognitive, emotional and social
development are different
 The evolution of digital culture effect
adult/parent development
 Need for increased awareness that will
influence our empathy, expectations, and
effectiveness

7. DIGITAL AGE CULTURE
 Rapid and vast technological advances
 Increased capability for accessing information
 Altered everyday communication
 Transform opportunities for learning
 Digital Natives: socialize, create, work, and play

8. DIGITAL CULTURE
Under Age Two (2):
 59% of American children watch television
 42% watch a video or DVD
 5% use a computer
 3% play videogames

9. DIGITAL CULTURE
From four (4) to six (6) years old:
 70% have used computers
 50% have played video games
 Most have begun to exert more control and
choice over their patterns of TV and music
consumption
 Carnegie, 2005

10. DIGITAL CULTURE
 69 percent of children aged 2-5 can use a computer
mouse, but only 11 percent can tie their own shoelaces.
 More young children know how to play a computer
game (58 percent) than swim (20 percent) or ride a
bike (52 percent).
 Due to the increasing tendency of parents to upload
pictures of their newborns, 92 percent of children now
have an online footprint before they are 2 years old.
 The average “digital birth” happens at around six
months old.

11. DIGITAL CULTURE
 A 2010 Nielsen study suggests that 36% of children
between the ages of 2 and 11 use different media
simultaneously.
 Though not included in the original report, Sesame
Workshop has clarified that 23% of parents of children
between ages 0 and 5 say these children use the
Internet. Of that percentage, 82% use it on a weekly
basis.

12. DIGITAL CULTURE
 By age 7, many are active users on networked gaming
sites such as Club Penguin
 Children between the ages of 8 and 10 spend about 5.5
hours each day using media — eight hours if you
count the additional media consumed while
multitasking.
 60% of 7-12th graders “talk on the phone, instant
message, watch TV, listen to music, or surf the Web for
fun” at least some of the time as they do homework.

13. MRI INSIGHTS INTO
BRAIN DEVELOPMENT

14. MRI INSIGHTS
 Advanced diagnostic imaging technology has revealed a lot
 Brain development depends on a complex interplay
between genes and the environment
 The primary task of the brain during early childhood is to
connect brain cells. The process involves waves of intense
branching and connecting followed by reduction in
neurons
 Experience wires the brain. Repetition strengthens the
wiring

15. INFANT BRAIN
 Born with a limited amount of neurological wiring.
 Nothing is wired in the higher region of the brain, known
as the cerebellum.
 The hardware is in place and ready to wire but requires
‘earthly’ experiences and human interactions for the cells to
forge neurological networks
 Networks that will become the foundation for thinking
and reasoning, language, physical movement, and social
and emotional behaviors.

16. TODDLER BRAIN
 First three years: A child builds an estimated 1,000
trillion synapses through the experiences encountered
 Brain development does not stop after early childhood,
but it is the foundation upon which the brain
continues developing.
 It is the time to build either a strong and supportive, or
fragile and unreliable foundation. These early years are
very important in the development that continues in
childhood, adolescence, and adulthood.

17. CHILD BRAIN
 Just prior to puberty there is a period of growth and change that
provides a great opportunity for hard-wiring positive lifelong
habits, or conversely, for hard-wiring negative or detrimental
lifelong habits.
 The neural network expands exponentially. If not used
repeatedly, or often enough, they are eliminated in a process
called pruning
 A sort of "use it or lose it" system for ensuring that the brain
nourishes only the neurons and synapses that are useful.
 Pruning, which occurs in different parts of the brain at different
times, also appears to allow the brain to think more efficiently.

18. TEEN BRAIN
 The teenagers brain is, in some ways, closer to a child's
brain than to an adult's.
 The brain pruning and development moves from the back
forward and from the inside out
 Brain’s C.E.O is last.
 Until prefrontal cortex has been pruned, there will be
difficulty organizing several tasks, making good
judgments, deciding, for example, which to do first: call a
friend, wash the dishes, or read the book for a report that's
due in the morning.

19. TEEN BRAIN
 Blame this on the parts of his brain that process emotions
and make decisions. The prefrontal cortex, is practically
asleep at the wheel.
 At the same time, the limbic system, where raw emotions
such as anger are generated, is entering a stage of
development in which it goes into hyper-drive.
 These revved up emotional centers are probably also under
the influence of sex hormones.
 This tumultuous period isn't completed in most people
until their early 20’s
 Good news, this active rewiring at this stage indicates that
even troubled teenagers can still learn restraint, judgment,
and empathy

20. STILL UNDER CONSTRUCTION
 The ability to plan and adapt to the social environment
 The ability to imagine possible future consequences of action or to
appropriately gauge their emotional significance
 Brain functions that enhance teens’ ability to connect gut feelings with
their ability to help retrieve memories
 The ability to put situations into context
 The ability to remember past details about a situation that might be
important
 The majority of adolescent brain functioning takes place in the ventral
striatum, where decisions are made based on rewards and emotions
without the back-up cognitive strength of the pre-frontal cortex.

21. DIGITAL BRAIN INSIGHTS
 Engaging in tasks that exercise their brains, marshal their
thoughts, measure their impulses, and prompt an
understanding of abstract concepts, lays the neural
foundations that will serve them for the rest of their lives.
 This hard-wiring also provides yet another reason for teens
not to take drugs or alcohol, because they may
permanently alter the balance of chemicals in their brains.
 New research shows that most children emerge from
adolescence physically and emotionally intact

22. CELEBRATION AND CONCERN
21st Century Fluency Project
 Digital Learners: Prefer to process data and high
speed information from multiple sources quickly
 Educators: Prefer slow and controlled release of
information from limited sources
 Digital Learners: Study via parallel processing
and absorb through multi-tasking
 Educators: Isolate from distraction and focus on
the task at hand

23. CELEBRATION AND CONCERN
 Digital Learners: Interactive digital imagery and
animation has put text in a secondary role.
 Educators: Provide images to compliment text
 Digital Learners: Sensory bombardment has many
students today being visual learners
 Educators: Still rely heavily on auditory lectures
 Digital Learners: “Just in time”
 Educators: “Just in case”

24. CELEBRATION AND CONCERN
 Digital Learners: Provided instant gratification with
immediate and deferred rewards
-Affirmation
-Attention
-A chance to distinguish themselves
 Educators: Promote delayed gratification
-Study hard and keep focused
-You’ll eventually be rewarded
-Good grades or acceptance to a good college

25. CELEBRATION AND CONCERN
Continuous Partial Attention (CPA)
 Separate from multitasking is a need/desire to split
attention and constantly monitor incoming data across
multiple platforms
 This constant scanning generates an artificial sense of
constant crisis and the need for continual vigilance.
 CPA used as our dominant attention mode 24/7 , in an
always on world, may lead to feeling overwhelmed,
over-stimulated and to a sense of being unfulfilled.

26. CELEBRATION AND CONCERN
Hyperlinked/Non linear Online Text
 Advantages to define words, provide additional
instructions, or in depth related information
 Assume kids are as comfortable with digital texts as
they are with written text if not more so.
 In fact, confused and overwhelmed by the overload of
disconnected information
 Often get lost on a site, re-click already-visited areas by
mistake, click randomly and indiscriminately, click on
ads without realizing they were ads, fail to scroll down
a page, and simply get frustrated and leave the site.

27. CELEBRATION AND CONCERN
Steady Social Connectivity and Communication
 Never having to be alone or far from friends; alleviates
loneliness and boredom
 This reduces opportunity for self-reflection—which
depends on having an emotion, experiencing it,
sometimes electing to share it with another & thinking
about it differently over time.
 Emotional interchanges are often reduced to the
shorthand of emoticons (+;

28. HOW YOU DOIN’?

29. CELEBRATION AND CONCERN
Digital Native Skills Gained
 Brains can process information at a greater speed
 Better at hand-eye coordination
 Improved peripheral vision
 Exposure to a larger, global community full of different
cultures, languages, and human relationships

30. CELEBRATION AND CONCERN
Digital Natives Skills That Might Be Lost
 Ability to read facial cues and other non-verbal signs
 Understanding the concept of “personal space”
 The ability to empathize with people
 Thinking in a deeper level of introspection or
understanding

31. CELEBRATION AND CONCERN
Flirtation and Dating
 Ambiguous flirtation that protects the sender if the
feelings are not mutual
 “Dating” individuals who they never met “in person”
 “Facebook official”: relationship status solidified
 The intensity of intimate relationships signaled through
shared pass-words, photographs, posting bulletins

32. CELEBRATION AND CONCERN
Breaking Up
 Via text…..or worse just noticing status change
 Require digital housecleaning; historical corollaries in
ridding a bedroom or wallet of an ex-intimate’s
pictures.
 Since old profiles can be saved, downloaded, copied,
and circulated—the severing of a romantic
relationship may involve leaving, or changing, the
social network sites in the interest of privacy.
 Very difficult to establish boundaries to prevent
interference.

33. CELEBRATION AND CONCERN
Relationships
 New media provides a venue that renders intimacy
simultaneously more public and more private.
 Young people can now meet people, flirt, date, and
break up outside of the earshot and eyesight of their
parents and other adults
 While also doing these things in front of all of their
online friends.

34. IDENTITY DEVELOPMENT

35. IDENTITY DEVELOPMENT
 Adolescence marks an important stage in the
development of one’s sense of self.
 Erikson claimed that adolescents require a
psychosocial “time out,” during which they are free to
contemplate and try on a variety of different roles
 Individuals use this process of self-reflection and
experimentation to construct a personal identity that
makes sense to them and is recognized by others.
 Feedback, particularly from peers, plays a central role
in identity development.

36. IDENTITY DEVELOPMENT
 Some concern with online profiles: Is “the self”
increasingly becoming externally manufactured rather
than internally developed?
 Blogs may assist in the process of identity exploration
by providing a space online to write about and reflect
on their emerging beliefs, values, and goals
 Is uploading pictures and poems on one’s Facebook
profile similar to decorating a school locker or binder?

37. IDENTITY DEVELOPMENT
 Is sexting digitally exacerbated normative adolescent
behavior?
 In many cases, teens who conceal their sexting from
authority figures have minimal adverse consequences
 Adult response style often exacerbates problem
 Authority figures in at least six states charge less
troubled teens who send naked pictures of themselves
with distributing child pornography!

38. SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT
 On the friendship-driven side, online spaces and
communications media are seen as places to hang out
with their friends similar to the mall or front stoop
 We over schedule our kids, not home after school to
“play” outside with friends.
 Opportunity to casually connect with friends and
engage in private communication that is not
monitored by parents and teachers

39. AUTONOMY
 Adolescents’ search for autonomy is difficult in today’s
society due to them having little unstructured time
and few public spaces open to them that are not
supervised by adults.
 The proliferation of new digital media has amplified
parents’ monitoring capabilities, even when they are
geographically separated from their children
 Within this context, many adolescents turn to the
Internet as a space to communicate with their friends

40. AUTONOMY
 Quest for autonomy often coincides with the
realization that one’s parents are imperfect individuals
whose authority should be limited
 Not surprising that many adolescents deem the
Internet outside the bounds of legitimate parental
authority
 Keeping this in mind, understandable that adolescents
seek to delete the search history on their computers,
refuse to “friend” their parents on Facebook, or create
“mirror” profiles known only to their friends

41. AUTONOMY
 Like parents who enter their kids’ bedrooms without
knocking or listen in on their conversations, kids view
these acts as a violation of trust.
 They also see these online invasions as “clueless,” ill
informed, and lacking in basic social propriety.
 Parents’ participation is often perceived as controlling and
disrespectful
 Adolescent rebellion is not a new phenomenon. The way it
is carried out with new digital media, however, is new.
 The ease of circumventing parental monitoring
complicates the way that parents establish and exert their
authority

42. PARENT-CHILD RELATIONSHIP
 High risk of power struggles and mutual loss of trust
 Avoid sudden emotional changes in parenting style
 Overreaction or anger, banning technology, or
suddenly installing monitoring software can have
unintended, sometimes risky effects and
workarounds.

43. PARENT-CHILD RELATIONSHIPS
 If a parent is disengaged from the new media, there is
a risk of creating an intergenerational wedge.
 Must be attuned to the norms that exist or our
children will perceive them as raw and ill-informed
exercises of power
 If parents can trust that their own values are being
transmitted through their ongoing communication
with their children, then new media practices can be
sites of shared focus rather than anxiety and tension.

44. It’s 6 PM….Do you know where
your children are?

45. Hmmm…SO WHAT DO WE DO??
 Reality checks. Our kids deserve reminders that
there is much more to life and them, than that
conveyed online and in school.
 Balance. This is pretty intuitive for parents, the need
to help kids balance the activities in their lives – social,
academic, onscreen, off-screen, etc. But go deeper.
With constant exposure to friends’ thinking, do kids
have enough chances for the reflection and
independent thought that help them figure out who
they are in relation to it all?

46. Hmmm…SO WHAT DO WE DO??
 Guidance. This is intuitive for parents, too, but how do we
offer that guidance as digital immigrants? The command-
and-control, sage-on-the-stage way, or as guide by the side?
 Leadership vs. Authority Adult response to stimuli tends
to be more intellectual, while teens’ is often more "from the
gut.” This suggests that while the changeability of the
adolescent brain is well suited to meet the demands of teen
life, guidance from adults are essential while this decision-
making circuitry is being formed

47. PARENT DEVELOPMENT
 People who become parents and are involved in the
raising of children are transformed and follow a
different developmental trajectory than people who do
not engage in parenting roles
 It is likely that the more engaged a parent is, the more
his or her adult development will be affected

48. PARENT DEVELOPMENT
Stages of Parenthood
 Image-making Stage: Before the baby comes you
form an image of the parent you want to become
before your baby is born or brought into the family.
 Nurturing Stage: Birth to 18 months-This is a time of
forming attachment with the child and identifying
yourself as a parent.
 Interpretive Stage: Age 5 through elementary school
-During the interpretive stage, you must explain
yourself to your child. The questions will grow as your
child's language and understanding expands.

49. PARENT DEVELOPMENT
Stages of Parenthood, Con’t.
 Interdependent Stage: Teen years
The challenges of this stage are similar to the authority
stage in preschool years but the stakes are higher. Your
child is figuring out how to be a teenager. Fights over
authority arise again but this time with bigger
decisions. Although they are taught to say "No," teens
have a need to experiment.

50. PARENT DEVELOPMENT
Stages of Parenthood Con’t.
 Departure Stage: Age varies
During the departure stage, again there are images of
death, separation, and distancing. Parents imagine
where their children will go and who they will be with.
They reflect on their parenting and how they affected
the people their children have become. Parents judge
themselves.

51. ADULT DEVELOPMENT
 The adult life structure evolves through a sequence of
alternating periods each lasting some five to seven
years.
 A period of building and maintaining a life structure is
followed by a transitional period in which we
terminate the existing structure and move toward a
new one that will fully emerge in the ensuing structure
building-maintaining period.

52. ADULT DEVELOPMENT
 The evolution of everyone’s life involves:
-Stability and change
-Continuity and discontinuity
-Orderly progression as well as regression and
chaotic flux.
 The issue of identity formation gets re-visited
 Risk-taking, loss, fear, and anxiety are normative

53. SELF REFLECTION AND
ASSESSMENT
 As digital immigrants we need to learn the language
and culture if we are to parent most effectively.
 To be successful and satisfied, parents need to learn
more than what to do and what to say to your children.
 Possessing sensitivity to your own needs as well as
your children’s developmental needs is important
 Parents need help developing a clearer understanding
of our expectations and values for our children and for
ourselves as parents.

54. SELF REFLECTION AND
ASSESSMENT
 Values clarification along with our reactions to
disappointment and frustration, gives us the
emotional tools to deal with issues and difficulties in
ways that benefit both children and parents.
 Need to review your expectations , how you deal with
anxiety
 Need to assess our current level of functioning overall

55. To Continue This Conversation
and Others….
Life Coaching and Empowerment Groups and Workshops
 Navigating the Middle School Maze
 Courtship, Romance, and Hooking Up
 Footloose, Fancy Free, and Freaking Out
 Family life in the Digital Age
Speaking Engagements
Individual/ Family/Small Business Coaching
Consultations-Formulations-Recommendations
Individual, Family, Parenting Coaching

56. THANK YOU!!!
Susan Hughes May, Ph.D.
Journey’s Way Coaching and Consulting
678-756-1546
www.drsusanhmay@gmail.com
A New Start Counseling Center
www.newstartcounseling.com
770-461-9944
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/dr-susan-may/18/b51/a92