Parenting for the Digital Generation: A Guide to Digital Education and the Online Environment

“Unconditional love, support, structure, and stability” aren’t the focus of the digital era, suggests law professor Garon in this savvy, nuanced take on parenting an online generation. To help parents harness the power of the web as part of a healthy environment for children, the author focuses on the need for 21st-century “information literacy, digital literacy, privacy literacy, and cultural competency” for both kids and adults. He covers concerns with seriousness but never fearmongering, touching on online connections (a great potential way for children, particularly LGBTQ kids, to find supportive communities), pornography (child pornography is prosecutable even when the material is created by teens and only shared with peers), and the potential for political radicalization or the possibility that an adolescent could become a malicious hacker. He outlines security and privacy practices and offers e-commerce safety tips, and his legal background comes through in concise explanations of online privacy protections and educational accessibility law. Though the writing tends to be stiff, Garon’s guidance is nonetheless easy to understand, even for those without a technical background. Parents skeptical about the web would do well to pick this up. (Jan.)