 Well, congratulations. You have made it through the whole conference. This is the last session before the wrap-up, and you're still here. So good job. You evidently did not party too hard last night. I did not party too hard last night, but I did take a red eye, so if I fall asleep on stage, I apologize. I was in San Francisco until 10 o'clock yesterday. That's okay. We're going to get through this. I'm super excited to be here and have this talk recorded because a bunch of people ask me for it when I say I've done it, and I haven't ever been able to say here it's a recording. So now we're going to have a recording, and that's really great. And I appreciate the Drupal Conference Committee for selecting the talk and making that possible for me. All right. So just in case you think you might be in the wrong place, this talk is called The Kids Are Going to Be 200 Okay, and I really amused myself with HTTP return code jokes because that's the kind of old-school nerd I am. And sometimes I give this talk with my son, who is now 15, but evidently he has to go to school and take AP tests, so he didn't come with me this time. So content notes. Before we get into this, I want to warn you about some things that are going to happen in this talk, and if they are things that you can't handle, feel free to note out of this talk, and I want to surprise you. So we are going to talk about the existence of human sexuality. I have carefully designed this part, so it does not violate any part of the code of conduct, but if you feel like it does, you should say something, either to me or to the conference organizers, okay? We're going to talk about disordered eating. If that is a trigger for you, please feel free to leave, and we're going to have brief mentions of bullying and suicide. So hi, I'm Heidi. I am the developer advocate for LaunchDarkly. We do feature flags as a service. If you are curious about what that means, you can get me later. But most importantly to this talk, I am a trained, comprehensive sexual educator. That's right. I take junior high kids, I sit them down in a Sunday school room, and I use words that I am not allowed to use on stage here, because sometimes that's the best way to teach people. The important part about comprehensive sex ed is that it's based on giving people all the information they need to make sound and meaningful choices with their lives. And it's a really revolutionary way to address sex ed, given that most of us have come up in a really different educational setting. So at this point, you're like, what does that have to do with information security? I was promised a kids and infosec talk, you are now talking about sex ed, and I am now thinking about my kid, and I'm very uncomfortable. It has everything to do with that. So how many of you drive a car? This is an audience response thing. How many of you drive a car? Okay. Keep your hands up. Keep your hands up. How many of you got some kinds of driver's ed? If you did, you can put your hands down. Yeah, if you did. Okay. How many of you had a permit where you had to drive with an adult? Yeah? Well, we're like, yeah. How many of you got behind the wheel of a car when you turned 18, took your test perfectly, and got a license with no practice? You did. I'm impressed. Okay, here's another one. How many of you can swim? All right. Now keep your hand up if you learn to swim because someone pushed you into a pool when you were fully grown wearing all your clothes. Huh. Okay. Let's do another one. I'm not surprised by these results. They're exactly what I would predict because the way we teach people to do things that might be dangerous is with supervision and practice and graduated risk. This should apply to sex ed too, but I think we'll leave out the audience participation questions for that part in a professional setting. So, okay, last one. How many of you got online before your parents knew it was dangerous? Yeah. How many of you would or do restrict your children's internet because the internet is dangerous? Interesting. So they get more protection than we do, which in some cases is great because, wow, there's a lot of scary things on the internet as we found out when we were 15. And we're only a little scarred. So we have two models for teaching our kids important life skills. The first one is how we teach driving. We start with theory and then structured practice. We escalate their privileges slowly and make sure that there's supervision while they're learning to operate a three-ton death machine. It's progressive learning and it's pretty practical and we keep refining the methods that we use to teach this. The second way is the way we culturally handle sexuality. There are exceptions, and I know because I teach one of them, but on the whole we teach kids to abstain, to be afraid of disease, and generally to feel bad for even thinking about something that the whole world is obsessed with. It's a lot of mixed messages when you're a kid. So one of these methods saves lives. And one of them leads to people with misconceptions and viruses. I think perhaps we should use the first method when we introduce our kids concepts of information security, safe internet use, and computer-mediated communication which is like the technical academic term for it. So first let me start with why you should not be restricting your kid's screen time to small amounts a day. Which is the first thing that most people reach for. You get 15 minutes a day of screen time. You get an hour a day of screen time and you can earn more if you do yard work. However it is, you have a relatively limited amount of time that you're letting the kids online. To understand why I think that's problematic, let's go back to World War II. A guy named Ansel Keys did a study with conscientious objectors in Minnesota. And it is called the Minnesota Starvation Study. These are men who believed so strongly in the principles of nonviolence that they essentially committed themselves to mental experimentation rather than pick up a gut. Ansel Keys reduced their calorie intake to about 900 calories a day and recorded what happened. These pacifists started getting in fights and stealing each other's food and being aggressive and being depressed and being suicidal and one of them chopped his thumb off. He can't remember why he did it yet at the time. So obviously restricting their calories was doing something really weird to their brain. All they could think about was food and how to get it because they couldn't have it all the time. It's an amazing thing that dieting literally makes you crazy and in the same way harsh restrictions on anything makes us kind of obsessive about getting it. Like if you remember being a kid, the one thing you weren't allowed to have is the thing you would beg for all the time. Your parents are just like, oh my gosh. No, no, no, not gonna happen. I'm not saying internet access is as important as food or calories, but I'm saying that when we have a scarcity of things, we obsess about it and it's distracting. And then we get some of it and with that as a consequence, we gorge. We have no moderation in how we eat because we never know when we're going to get it again. So we just bolt down as much as we can. Our kids are socializing online for a lot of reasons that are a whole different talk, but if you want to read about it, you should read Dana Boyd's It's Complicated. It's a great book, sort of scary but great. So when we restrict them to very small amounts of time online, they get obsessed and they gorge whenever they can get it. They're, you know, texting under the table and they're circumventing our rules in order to be able to talk to their friends just like we would at that age. They can't develop a healthy relationship with it and learn to walk away from it because it's too precious. Kids with free time will do things like download mods for their games or learn Khan Academy or extrapolate things from YouTube tutorials. I don't understand learning computers from YouTube tutorials but it's totally a thing kids do. And, yeah, they're going to play way too much civilization, but I tell you what I did manage to graduate college even though civilization but they're only going to have space to do that if you're giving them the whole banquet to choose from Brussels sprouts to bacon to creme brulee. I always end up throwing out leftover Halloween candy at Christmas like we have candy purge seasons and what happens is my kids eat all the favorites out of their bag and then the bag just sits there and it's not their favorites and they're not obsessed because it's right there and then they just don't eat it and if I don't remember to purge it at Christmas and Easter I end up with a real problem. I'm like, why is there half a pillowcase of candy? All right, okay. Sometimes my kids who have a lot of internet access choose to play outside because they know that they're going to have some later. It's not a restricted commodity. Scarcity mentality is not something I want to teach my children. I am very privileged and I want them to experience that privilege. It's problematic that I am more privileged than other people and I acknowledge that I don't see any reason to artificially restrict that. I want kids to feel like they don't have to learn the online equivalent of bolting their food. I want them to sit down at this big feast and decide what they feel like eating in the moment and then walk away when they're full. I want them to have a more complicated relationship than denial and desire. More complicated relationship with everything than denial and desire because as adults it's really hard to deny yourself things. We have a lot of desires but if we don't learn to walk away when we're full as adults, we have a lot of problems. So how are you going to do this? One of the things I really recommend is what I call gentle supervision and this is hard to do. It's a learned skill because the thing you're trying to let the kids do is know that you're around every movement. The degree of that all depends on your particular kids. Somebody very smart once said if you've seen one kid, you've seen one kid and as parent of two kids I will absolutely confirm that they come out different and it has I don't know how anybody who has more than one child believes in nurture over nature. No, they just come out different. I got issued different kids, that's all. Mostly my spouse and I started this by being in the room with kids while they were playing computer games and by being willing to help them when they got stuck. And I assure you, it was boring and tedious. Just like no sober adult has ever wanted to watch the Wiggles you do not actually want to sit there and help them with Minecraft. I'm sorry. It's really boring. Roblox is worse. It's just part of what you have to do because you're forming a relationship where being online is something that we are social about that we talk about that's part of our family ethos and I want you to be talking to them about what you're doing. If you're reading your phone and you laugh at something on Twitter you should say I laughed at something on Twitter and if it's at all possible to explain the backstory of like 14 different memetic components you should explain it. Usually the stuff I laugh at on Twitter is hard to explain. So that gave us a common vocabulary of usage. So I learned what griefing was and they learned not to put in their name or age ever. Making it a mutual learning experience made it feel a lot gentler and less invasive to them than laying down the law. Because we all do better following contracts than obeying rules. Agreeing to a set of guidelines together is going to have much better compliance than top down enforcement. So letting your kids help decide what an important rule is is going to make it feel so much better for you. For example, if you ask them what they think an important rule at mealtime is, they may come up with no interrupting or no feet on the table. Or if you ask them what they think an important rule for parents is they may say no interrupting no phones at the table. My kids will totally police if I'm on the phone at the table. This is not the place we use our phones. If there are other people there we're going to use phones if we're eating alone we can read our books on our phones. If you ask a kid what they think an important internet rule is they may already have some in mind that would be different than what you would guess. And it's interesting to listen to them and see what they've learned from their peers and what they've learned from school. What it is they are coming to you already knowing. And one of the ways we teach kids is by acting out our values and experiences in front of them. Sometimes I will put my computer away in sort of a huff. I'll be like I'm really frustrated by this thing I'm working on. And I'm going to take some time out. By doing that in front of them I'm giving them permission to have that same coping mechanism. By talking to them about people online I'm giving them permission to talk to me about people online when they have trouble. And if you set that up before there's a crisis that that line that channel of communication already exists because just like do y'all have tornado sirens here? No, not a thing. In Minnesota we have tornado sirens because we get tornadoes and the first Wednesday of every month at one o'clock the tornado siren goes off and everybody goes oh yeah first Wednesday. If there's ever a tornado on the first Wednesday of the month because whatever but we learned that it was important to test that every month because if you don't it doesn't always go off. Then you end up with people dead instead of like hanging out in the bathtub. One of these is much preferable. So here's the thing kids don't actually like being interrogated about their day it turns out so I had a conversation with my child the one who currently talks to me entirely in meows so this is like a few months ago how was your day? Fine. How was math? Okay. Nobody has enjoyed this conversation. I'm like get me something and she's like why it's the same as it was yesterday mom. So instead sometimes I'll try like today at work you know that all electrical transformers are filled with diesel fuel so in the zombie apocalypse you can drain them and use diesel fuel? True fact. You may not get a response but at least you don't feel like the least successful inquisitor ever. You may not be starting with three year olds. Starting with three year olds is relatively easy because you're building this whole relationship. You may be starting with a teenager and they would rather be swallowed by the earth than live their life. I remember that phase and the earth swallowing seemed preferable to my parents being like lovingly involved. That's okay. You still need to treat their online life as real important. You need to talk to them about your online life and normalize conversation so it's not an impossible hurdle. In the last few months my son has taken a voice chat gaming weird because his voice also dropped and so there's this strange man constantly rumbling around in my house I'm sure I'll adapt to it eventually but I need to remember that he's talking to his friends and I can't just like walk into the room and demand he take the garbage out I need to like wait for a pause so I'm not like that mom because nobody wants to have their friends see their mom be like take the garbage out although if it would work he's very good so let's talk about what you should worry about because all the time I get this question from parents like what do you worry about there are so many bad things online so let's talk about things that aren't so bad internet addiction is not a physiological problem like many addiction behaviors it's a reflection of mental health your kid is spending all of their waking hours online either they're having a good time with it or there's something deeper going on it's not the internet it's something with your kid pay attention their eyeballs will not actually fall out of their head no matter what your mom said to you when you were sitting like five feet from the television it's not a thing and phone thumb is a real thing but it can be treated large phones are the devil especially if you have little kid hands it's just terrible we do worry about exploitation we have this whole TV show about luring online predators and it's sensationalist and gross luring and online grooming is a thing that actually happens but not nearly as often as people think just like stranger abduction it is much rarer than abuse within the home or within the friend circle so if you're worrying as you think your child is being exploited by someone first check the coaches and the uncles and the priests and then think about online so how can we actually protect our kids the solution to prevent and mitigate exploitation is the same for both in person and online teach your kids that they're allowed to have boundaries and to tell people no you know that thing where you're supposed to give your grandma a hug even though she always squeezes you too tight and you don't like it you ever make your kid give grandma a hug because grandma's really hurt stop doing that every time you tell a child they have to allow physical contact you are grooming them every time you say your relatives wishes override your own you're saying your boundaries don't matter there are times we have to violate this like no kid likes getting their vaccination fine stay in the room with them apologize to them for violating their boundaries but if it's grandma wants a kiss sorry grandma you're a grown up handle it make sure that your kids can bring their problems to you without getting in trouble instantly when I was a teenager my parents set up a thing and they would call them and they would come pick my ass up from wherever I was and they would not ask me any questions that night wherever I was whatever was happening whatever state I was in they would come get me and I never actually ended up needing to invoke that because I was a super boring teenager but as a safety valve it was amazing because like when that happens how are you going to explain to your parents that you're drunk too so give your kids a way to say I have a problem without them getting in trouble instantly it's really important and then keep an eye out for personality changes those three things are not a foolproof method for thwarting bad people but they help a lot if you have a cheery kid who suddenly shuts down maybe it's hormones God knows teenagers maybe it's they're exhausted maybe they're sick maybe they have a mental illness depression kicks in earlier than most people think sometime between like 8 and 13 for a lot of people go get some professional help but don't ignore it because a drastic personality changes frequently a sign that just like your pets they don't talk to you but you can tell and then I actually had these up there actually protect kids allow them to police their own boundaries let them say no to things always love them no matter how they screw up there are some reasons it's absolutely valid to start monitoring your kids human interactions if you think there's a mental health problem going on there are some reasons to suspect they're in trouble if they suddenly start flunking a bunch of classes and if you and a mental health professional agree that it's important or if they ask you I had a kid in one of my sex ed classes who asked me to help her go through her email and dump a bunch of email that she kept rereading in a really unhealthy way I'm like yeah sure I'll help you with that kid but I wouldn't have gone into her email like that would be gross but don't make surveillance the default position mandated reporters have to tell authorities when they think a kid is in danger decide what in your kid's online life warns them telling you like what do you want to know about what do you agree to know about without punishing them so for instance if they say yeah no my friends are buying drugs online do you want to come down on them and say like okay well how do you feel about that because if you come down on them they're never going to tell you again anything that's going online you've told them that they will be punished for disclosure the more you open up and welcome disclosure and like set appropriate boundaries the more they're going to keep talking to you sleep you should be worrying more about sleep kids even older kids need a ridiculous amount of sleep I let my kids online for hours at a time but they also have to have an hour of no screen time before they go to bed that would be good for me too but unfortunately my mommy lives a long ways away and has not come to take my phone out of my bedroom left to their own devices like over spring break they will literally sleep 12 and 13 hours a day that tells me that there is no human way they can get enough sleep during the school year the reason I keep the screens out of the bedroom is not because I think they're on naughty sites at night but because the light keeps them up and because it's interesting and they want to keep reading it and refreshing it and then they don't get even the like 7 or 8 hours that they actually manage during a school day so if we think 10 hours of sleep which is the recommended dosage for an adolescent 6 hours of school 2 hours of showering and transportation that only leaves the average high schooler with 6 hours a day and that's before we count in sports drama lessons or work, eating or any other leisure it's really hard for us not to fill that time up oh well it's piano lessons once a week oh it's karate twice a week we're not letting the kids have any breathing space they don't have any time to get bored only bored people are creative like if you're super busy, if you're slammed at work are you thinking up new ideas now only bored people can be creative and there's no better time to be creative in your life than when you're a kid gross diseases for us the worst part of letting our kids online was that they would download anything and there's a lot of like dark UX out there that's like super shiny and appealing to children and has unicorns and shiny rainbows on it and it's really hard to train a kid not to click the shiny thing that's next to the shiny thing they're actually supposed to click as anybody who ever downloaded free software from a site for adults has found out like where did I get that for a while my son's obsession with Minecraft mods was so intense and so indiscriminate that we took his Windows computer away re-imaged it and said welcome to Ubuntu he's a perfectly competent Linux admin now but he spent three years having to use Ubuntu because he could not be trusted to not download shit that exploded our entire network I also it's not the worst idea to fire while your kids computers off from yours because they're bad at this you hope you don't have to take their machine down to bare metal but it's better than taking your machine down to bare metal eventually you can teach wariness about attractive flashing things just like we teach teenagers to use condoms but if we really care about contraception we teach teenagers to use condoms for hormonal birth control you should teach kids not to click things and you should undoubtedly install a ferocious virus blocker and ad blocker there's no excuse not to be using an ad blocker now until they stop inserting crap in the ads just block them all I'm sorry Forbes that's the way it's gonna be and except that they're gonna catch something and hope that it's relatively mild but it's gonna be a lesson if we do have to take our machine down to bare metal and then I had a question if you get personally identifiable information out of a little kid is it gold fishing the next thing I want you to teach your kids is there's no such thing as a free lunch this is a super important concept and it's one that we are painfully learning in senate hearings yesterday there's no such thing as a free lunch and if you're not the customer you are the product if we get that into kids heads early it's possible we could change how our culture is moving because I know you all know that and yet we haven't been able to change how it's going it costs money to run the internet and most of that money comes from ads which is to say attention so what I taught my kids was don't trust something if you can't see where it keeps its brain like Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets it was really useful for this because Ginny Weasley had a diary that wrote to her and seemed like her friend but we didn't know what was motivating it until the end that's how your kids should feel about websites that offer them free things like what's motivating you where's the money where's the money because there's always a money trail nobody does things for free we teach kids to be skeptical about strangers with candy but not about websites with free downloads and that needs to change let's teach kids about permanence this is the most embarrassing childhood of me that picture that I could find I'd like you to note that I was not tired I was just reading a book in my bed my dad had to scan this off a slide and he was like why would I have embarrassing baby pictures of you my parents are super wholesome until now most of my baby none of my baby pictures were online but the same can't be said for my kids this is my son's coming home picture right? oh what a little peanut their online existence actually starts in utero on live journals so dubiously still existant but you know but I think that kids grow up knowing that they're being documented and it changes their perception of what's appropriate to what they put online if you post a picture of them wearing nothing but bubbles when they're two and it's cute how do they know the line when they're 13 and it's a naked bathroom selfie that's the same thing to them it is the same thing naked picture in a bathroom naked picture in a bathroom we aren't doing a good job of protecting their privacy because they're so cute and it is so innocent to us there are two prongs to this one is that we have to treat our own children with the respect due to future adults because what we do now is going to last that long who here has an internet history longer than 15 years right? who here has a 15 year old no? oh for such fun the other prong is that we need to teach them that everything they send not just post but send can and may be used against them gossip, easy to forward pictures, easy to leak even nasty comments that they make to each other online can have this durable half-life that isn't easy to extinguish and those problems may not appear for years but at this point in time we can't assume that anything you post online will ever be forgotten nobody seems very excited about this except the Germans bless their hearts but there's a caveat to that let's talk about bullying when we think about pure bullying as adults we think about Retea Parsons who killed herself because of online bullying and we think about the Star Wars kid who had to move away from his home and his school and change his name and we think about all of the horrible stories we've known about the internet hate machine driving people to ultimate harm but it's much more likely that your kid is going to get into a fender bender than that they'll die in a car wreck and similarly it's more likely that online abuse by peers will be scary and miserable rather than life-threatening so worry but don't panic I certainly put the car off the road a couple times when I was learning to drive and your kid may have some bad experiences when they're learning to adult but probably it's going to be okay don't panic they're going to need help and support but you can help them manage it or you can get people to help you I really recommend Crash Override has a great set of resources for how to deal with online abuse then we need to teach them what the possible consequences are of what they're doing when I took Driver's Ed we had a particularly memorable film called Blood on the Tracks can anybody get blood on the tracks? yeah it made you scared of train tracks for life yeah I don't think we should terrify kids that much about the internet because that seems counterproductive with the hiding under the desk in like cupcake bakeries but I do think it's important to tell them that their actions and their choices have consequences and what those consequences might be and these change with age so here's my theory of age-graded topics ages three to seven it's important to teach kids that not everyone who says they're your friend is your friend it's a good lesson for life but they should prove it and not just by asking you for your Roblox coins my poor kid we had to do that eight to twelve hurting people is bad you should avoid it you should think about what might hurt them and not do that that's also just a generically good life lesson thirteen to sixteen creepers and con artists this is sort of the what are your motivations for talking to me because no well-intentioned adult is going to find an adolescent that interesting it's just not a thing I teach adolescents I find them awesome I love them they bore the pants off me I love you but did you just really spend three minutes picking a snapchat filter oh my god there's no attention to you and there's a giant age gap it's a little suspicious you should think about that age sixteen to twenty this is the really scary part because at this point we have very little control over how they're getting online or what they're doing and they are totally setting up their permanent record and when we used to say permanent record it meant like a file at the school and nobody actually ever referred to it that's not how the permanent record of the internet is going to work using the internet effectively requires a lot of theory of mind and it's not something kids really have naturally so we have to help them think about other people's motivations all through these ages what are their motivations what are their desires what are they trying to do what is being exchanged spending time with your kids teaching them that and potential consequences of their actions makes them a lot more aware what they think they take up what their motivations are saying why would somebody do that means that you also have to ask why would you do that you ever ask your kid why did you hit your friend and they're like they're your friend why would you hit them this answer by the way I was really hoping that when they got more verbal that would wear off but it hasn't the important thing I think to remember about kids online lives and relationships is that they're very real and very vivid to them and they may need help with that intensity like I remember feeling things so intensely at that age and everything was so important and also I read a lot of Edgar Allan Poe and I think the new version is listening to Panic at the Disco but I'm not sure but just because we find it sort of humorous that they are so dramatic about such small things doesn't mean it's not super important to them. Inoculation I vaccinated my kids for for HPV and I'm so excited like I get to just wipe a whole category of sexually transmitted infection off the board what so prevention is the best treatment and I think there are a lot of things that we can use the analogy of inoculation for if you teach their mental immune systems to recognize something or if you configure family training in such a way that they start off on the right foot they have a better chance of being happy with their choices in the long term and so here are some things that you can teach them early before you think they'll need them if there are two things that I could add to school curriculums it would be typing and content evaluation it's not just a problem for younger users as everybody who has a grandad on the internet knows it's for everyone how do you know whether content is valid? I propose the following questions to get a sense of whether something is true or truthy how do you know that? Did you experience it? Are there tests? Did you read it on a website? Did the website have Breitbart banners? Who says so? Are they all related in some way? What do you think groups think? Are they identifying as a clear culture of their own? All of these people believe this thing? And who benefits from me believing this? Is it a call to action? Is it something I need to respond to? And what will the result of the action be? The problem with teaching your kids this is that they will turn it around on you and they will say yeah, I do actually know somebody who says they all think alike and it's church and they never want to get up in the morning again. You know what? I can't help you. I have one who goes to church and one who doesn't. But giving them that mental inoculation to say who wants me to do that and why is going to be so valuable to them. Also if we don't teach them typing by third grade they teach themselves and it's horrible because they do crossovers. My kids type like 60 words a minute but like this. So typing, teach it early. Let's just never ever use our real names online. I'm exactly the right age where every stupid thing I said at the dawn of the widely accessible internet is gone because you now know exactly what age I am. Not even the way back machine can find my embarrassing early fanfic or my awkward flirting or my membership in Alt Barney Die Die Die. Our kids don't have that privilege. Currently every trend in computing is to store data and to compile a permanent record that would be boggling to us if we could see it printed out. Everything they say is getting archived somewhere and since it's pretty much impossible to keep anyone but especially kids from saying stupid things the next best thing is to make sure they're stupid things are not tied to the name they'll use for online dating or job searching. You might be thinking isn't there a right to be forgotten in Europe? There is but it doesn't apply to anything you post yourself. That's kind of a big caveat. So use a pseudonym or a nickname or a handle to decouple your online identity from your money-making college entering identity. And as long as we're talking about extortion and problems like that let's talk a little bit about ransomware I'm sorry Atlanta have off-site backups for your kids stuff like you probably have off-site backups for your stuff or at least a vague feeling of guilt like you should offer your kids the same privilege because the things that they've built are important to them and if you're not giving them some place to store them you're not trading their lives as important. My kid was devastated remember the Ubuntu computer it turns out if you install the nuclear mod and set it off programmatically like 1500 times you really can't recover that environment and he's like I'll just go get a back oh no there was no backup and then the magic smoke came out of the machine which is why he's back on Windows but if I'd been thinking I would have taught him how to do backups because that was the thing that was important to him but don't store it with other people alright let's talk about trolling the troll is coming from inside the house this is the scariest thing for me about parenting online is you don't know if your kid is an asshole it's true and but these are top skill and not an inherent trait and if you dismiss things that happen online is unreal then your kids are going to learn that what they do online is unreal and isn't really affecting actual humans I honestly believe that the source of internet trolling deep down is that most people who are doing it don't understand their targets as actual humans it's gamified to them and if we could prevent our kids from becoming those griefers that would be a great thing to do that means when you find out your kid is being a jerk online and you will because kids for the same reason they hit their friends you need to impose real world consequences you need to ground them or whatever like punishment method you use for expressing your dysplasia because I don't want our kids growing up being entitled shit lords who have no consequences for bad behavior and that's exactly what happens so don't let that happen drug commercials of the 80s showed a clean cut kid turning into like this grunge monster and it's not that simple to tell if your kid is doing drugs or if they're making someone's life a living hell you're going to need to watch their tone when they talk about other humans disgust and disdain are toxic indicators for relationships and for online life and I want you to think about that before you identify people in your life as worthless if you have ever called someone a worthless sack of skin your kid heard you your kid heard you and they're trying to figure out what worthless sack of skin they know github is the new letter jacket your kid may want to establish an identity online depending on what they want to do with their life it'll be useful to have some kind of history and if you don't let them play and experiment enough to get bored with what they've been offered they won't have any impetus to create not everyone's a creator I haven't written a lick of software since like college but my kid is a member of four github projects it's going to be significant when he goes to try for google summer of code or get into college so you want to think about how that identity may be something they want to carry forward or may not if kids made optimal decisions all the time they wouldn't need us drivers ed cars have a break on the instructor side and there are some situations where you're going to have to make the computer go away think about what that would be before it happens kids need their car keys taken away and sometimes they need their cell phone service turned off but when you do it remember it's a significant punishment you are really mad whatever just happened you are really mad this is not you failed to take the garbage out this is like you have abused somebody so do you remember being a teenager I do and I'm so lucky like I said that the internet does not remember me being a teenager my ill-advised immature megaloid adventures are gone for good but I think we should let kids form their own identity make their mistakes and then at like 18 take on an entirely new identity and keep it fire welled away from the kids self like a new coming of age ritual congratulations you're 18 you're now allowed to use your adult name ta da we could go out to dinner or something but the only way for that to work is if you've already taught your kid to use a pseudonym 100% of the time and that's really difficult because the school Google integration stuff is really geared toward real names and I'm troubled by how little they ask me about it to continue my car analogy letting a kid use their real name is like giving someone a really expensive really fast sports car the day they get their license and then telling them it's the only car they're ever going to have the car you're ever going to need also it's the only car you're ever going to have try not to crash it no one's going to be able to keep that car pristine and undamaged until they get to adulthood they don't have the skills for it so don't give them the keys to their permanent identity until they have some skills having a pseudonym is not the same as being anonymous a pseudonym is a persistent identifier that you use to interact with the community we know a lot of people by their pseudonyms and we don't believe they were trying to trick us or make us regret knowing them Mark Twain and Frank Sinatra didn't grow up with those names but they are famous in them so give your children that separation pseudonyms have another purpose besides separating our actions from our legal name they allow us to explore other identities there may be reasons your kid keeps playing with a female alt there may be reasons that your kid wants to explore identity you don't know what they need as long as they are not using that pseudonym to deliberately hurt somebody let it go that's not the name you gave them but that's fine because it's really important to be able to figure out who you are I think a lot of us did a lot of that early on had a lot of like identities we switched through before we settled on ourselves now have you ever been asked do you use that mouth with your mother probably you don't I don't swear in front of my mother and she knows that and she's also pretty aware that I swear in other contexts but that's not our relationship and it's important to model this context switching for kids what's okay at school may not be okay at home may not be okay at soccer practice or soccer practice is not the same as home like they need to be able to switch these contexts pretty fluidly and we expect them to do that but we also need to remember that online is a different context and different communities online are different contexts having an online persona is code switching to a greater degree constructed identities are part of how we explore our real identity we teach each other to be situationally aware around traffic around construction sites and around water right oh don't go near there you may fall in but the internet has neighborhoods too and we can teach our kids to identify them and feel safe or unsafe as appropriate like is it HTTP or HTTPS it's a good thing to like reflexively check for this light you've heard of before does it actually end in .com or .edu or does it have like a slightly weird top level domain name are the ads appropriate and not tricky probably it's safe if you visit a site and you feel like it's trying to trick you it's probably a good plan not to download stuff from there probably sort of the sketchy neighborhood be aware look around look at the signs next up human rights children it may surprise you to learn are humans and as such they have rights they don't have full rights for a number of cultural and cognitive reasons but that doesn't make them are possessions they have a right to food safety health education pretty much all of us agree on that but I also believe they have some rights to privacy autonomy and expression don't do it if your kid doesn't want it I mean it if your kid throws up her hand and says no pictures at her birthday party respect it I know it's hard she is super adorable ask before you take pictures or tell stories online because they have the right to control how they are represented I think that all of us would understand we don't want somebody telling stories about us if they seem embarrassing so why would we do that to our kids it's hard to judge these things with preverbal kids but think about what you might be okay with really really don't post embarrassing pictures of your kids there is an interesting case going on in England where the kids are suing their parents for over disclosing about them without permission there was a case in Minnesota where a dad lost his job as a soccer coach because he had taken ha ha cute pictures of his girls in the bubble bath and they were 10 and evidently child pornography is also in the eye of the beholder so when you think about posting something online think about whether your kid would be happy to see it when they are 30 there is a Pew study that says almost all parents talk to their kids about online behavior but that a large majority of parents feel like they have the right to monitor and surveil their children read the contents of their phones and their private accounts this is a super divisive issue when I asked my kids in the sex ed class how many of their parents had permission to read their phones three quarters of them said yes and one quarter of them were like ooh some parents when I talked to them about it said well my mom read my diary when I was younger and I was like did you like that? did you feel like that was an okay behavior or did you feel like it was invasive and you're just perpetuating that with your kid I'm not saying a hundred percent that is always wrong to read your kids stuff I am saying I think everybody has the right to private thoughts and having a phone instead of a adorable locked diary doesn't change the fact that you have the right to private thoughts I have a co-worker who told me that he monitors every site his kids go to and they know it and when I asked why he was monitoring them he said it would get them used to the corporate world in the way everything you do at work is tracked and monitored I was revolted I was like and it took me a while to figure out why teaching children they're never going to be unobserved seems like a great start condition for an authoritarian world teaching children that they never get to have a private life means that they will never expect a private life and I want a private life we are building our own prison and you have seen this happen it is a panopticon it is a prison where we are always seen but we cannot tell who is watching us all of these things come down to the problem of safety and autonomy our society is in a constant tension between safety and autonomy every time we go through airport security we are bending in the direction of safety every time we encrypt our laptops or protest exclusionary rules we are bending toward autonomy safety has virtues and attributes like compliance and censorship and surveillance and protection we don't have to think about keeping ourselves safe because someone else is doing it we have outsourced worry theoretically autonomy has attributes like risk and power and knowledge and consent it is really difficult to perform full autonomy if you don't have power and knowledge so it is this perpetuating cycle where the more knowledge you have the more autonomy you may want the generation we are raising right now will form a society with the values that we teach them let's think really carefully about the emergent properties of what we are building my wild dream I think my kids are going to have self-driving cars that seems like possible worries some good possible so I guess that one is off the table my impossible dream for kids is that I want an information jubilee through bible every 49 years there is a year of jubilee where slaves are freed and debts are voided and I'd like kids to get that when they turn 18 or 21 I want their entire juvenile history erased so that they can start fresh and new as adults free of what they did before they knew any better your kids are going to be ok they are not digital natives because no one is they are just taking the things that are miracles to us for granted there is no one way to parent and I hope I've been clear that I want you all to make your own decisions but I think you are going to have an easier time keeping your kids safe if you give them more and not less more of your time more practice, more chances to make mistakes on a small scale so that they can use that experience when they are working at a larger scale I think abstinence based education is actively harmful in terms of transforming their identities and that kids can handle nuance and contextual behavior much earlier than we give them credit for you are going to be fine and so are they so here are the basic rules for driving shiny side up, rubber side down don't change the shape of the shiny metal box those are the good rules basic rules for online no real names or data no dangerous secrets respect other people that's pretty straightforward right so if this was too long and you read twitter instead let me just say instead of focusing on keeping your kids safe work to teach them the skills so they can make good choices themselves and since I am here because lunch darkly kindly paid for my travel you can take a picture of this URL and go visit that and we will send you a free t-shirt thank you I think I have 4 minutes until I am out of time I am certainly happy to answer questions I just don't want to make you late for your keynote oops sorry how does an email address how do you put that in this pseudonym realm so technically your kid can't have an email address until they are 13 I know appropriate lying is an important skill to teach your kids like what you should lie about like your age because of stupid kappa and yeah my kids have pseudonym email addresses because I don't want them using their real name ever so I think my sons is based on the honest to God the innurduro name I had for him and my daughters is based on the nickname that we called her 6 years ago and when they want new email they can get them so going off of that I am raising my sister and I feel like she is 10 years old I don't want her to get a snapchat I keep using the excuse technically you are not allowed to have a snapchat because you are not old enough all her friends have a snapchat and I don't know how to navigate the because I know what I did when I was on the internet when I was her age and I feel like she would be fine but I also I don't know how to navigate those kind of things where I don't want her to feel excluded from doing things because her friends are doing them but I also really don't want her to have a snapchat so what are you worried about with her having a snapchat what is the thing you are afraid of I feel like it is kind of the exposure thing I am not really familiar with snapchat she has a musically and I am friends with her on musically she makes me watch all of her videos and it is fine but snapchat seems so much more pervasive and I am kind of scared right now musically seems like small fish small pond kind of thing like tiny child and this huge world right it seems too big and I don't know how to navigate that I think I would talk to her about what you are worried about like here are the behaviors that I am worried you would do and then I would say you can have a conditional snapchat account you have to include me on every friend group you have so you not only see her snapchats but her friends snapchat so you can sort of take the temperature of the group and the other kids will kick about this a little bit but they won't really like they want her online because that is how they are communicating with each other and so if you can insert yourself into that a little bit as like everybody knows you are there and you are watching give it a trial first get a snapchat of your own and play with it a while so it seems less alien and then give her a chance small mistakes the worst thing that happens on snapchat is somebody takes a screen capture so if you teacher never take a picture that you don't want screen capped that's like a good life lesson make sense yeah thanks hi thank you for the talk have you seen a kid who used a pseudonym all through their young years and then made the transition to 18 or whatever is it disruptive for them to adopt a new persona suddenly oh it's hugely disruptive and they lose work and I can't think of a good way to solve the problem of jumping to your official name or to a new pseudonym is a giant break but maybe one of the things all of us deserve is sort of that going away to college trying to get people to call you by a nickname kind of experience even online where we're like yeah I'm gonna experiment with who I am now like maybe somebody's gonna call me Jennifer instead of Jenny you know they will tell their friends their new identity and that will sort out the way it sorts out and that's a really transitional time for young adults because they are moving out and going away and growing up and becoming officially responsible and they shed a lot of friends at that point and it's a little it's a little hard on them and us we're like I knew those friends I liked those friends they came over for sleepover since you were 10 who's that dude but I think the disruption is part of the benefit to like sort of shed the habits of who we were all along alright like I said I'm happy to answer questions in person I'm probably not going to trivia night because I'm super tired but you can always find me at Wired Ferret is my Twitter handle or Heidi at LaunchDarkly.com thank you I appreciate that mine are five so I'm not going to be in a hurry about the anonymity and like treating people with districts I think there's a great podcast about conversations with people it's like an online blogger that calls out some of the channels and has a phone conversation I've seen that one there's also a really cool podcast called parent driven development that I totally forgot to mention parent driven development perfect thank you so much good job that seems like good hard work that's your talk I think it's especially hard when you're serving a non-traditional parent it's for I know my like I said I know what I did when I was on the internet but it's like I can't remember it have you heard of like Google has like Google family link so we've used that and mostly that so that like voice stuff that I think it would be interesting I had a point with you so I know that's something else thank you