Good Manners and the Digital World

“Ninety-nine percent of rude behavior can be avoided by thinking before you act. … Manners change, but principles are timeless and eternal,” says Daniel Post Senning, great-grandson of Emily Post. In an interview with BusinessNewsDaily.com, he said it all comes down to common sense, consideration, and communications.

Common sense, however, is a tricky thing. It works well in a shared (i.e., common) culture, but in this day and age of digitized globalization, what we hold in common is in constant flux. As Duncan Watts, a Columbia University professor and principal scientist at Yahoo! Research told BusinessNewsDaily, common sense works extremely well in concrete, immediate circumstances, but doesn’t scale well.

A 2010 Kaiser Foundation study showed that children aged 8 to 18 spend on average 7 hours and 38 minutes per day using entertainment technology. Seventy-one percent of these children have TVs in their bedrooms, and 45 percent of American homes have the TV on most of the day, regardless of whether anyone is watching it. It would appear dinner table conversation has been replaced by screen time and takeout. Kids spend more time online than they do with their families or in school.

So how do we teach common sense and manners in today’s digital world?

For many parents, the digital age is literally a whole new world. They feel inadequate to monitor or control their children’s online presence and digital usage. Kids often see their parents as digitally inadequate and unable to understand the technology that they themselves are so easily interacting with and consuming.

First, remind your children that people trump devices.

When you are with people, put your phone down—not in the middle of the table to be picked up at the first ubiquitous beep, but away, with the sound off. Look people in the eye. Talk to them. Listen to them. Engage with them. Other reminders:

• Have family meals where you gather together to talk and connect—no devices.
• Turn your sound off when in a public setting, like church, concerts, movies, etc. Or be radical and leave your phone at home. If you need something, you can borrow someone else’s phone.
• Don’t text and drive. Not a suggestion. This is a life and death habit to establish in your young drivers that might save more lives than their own. It is also against the law to text and drive in most states.
• Don’t talk on a cell phone while at the bank, ordering in a drive-through, or anywhere else. It’s rude to both the person you are talking to and the service provider.
• Practice online etiquette or “netiquette.”

Second, practice safety.

Put a filter on your devices. Monitor your kids’ online presence and usage. Friend them on social media, and make sure you know their digital footprint. Cyberbullying has led to more than one suicide. Kids don’t have impulse control or well-formed self-identities as of yet, and your job as a parent is not just to financially provide for them, but to protect their hearts, minds, and souls.

That means being aware of and being involved in various aspects of their lives, showing leadership, and setting parameters that are appropriate. Good manners include respecting parental authority and showing gratitude for the devices themselves as well as for the parental oversight.

Here are some important issues to consider and discuss with your kids about their online presence and manners in a busted-wide-open digital age:

Identity and Integrity. Talk to your kids about what it means to be a person of integrity—both online and off. Teach them that they should be who they are in every situation. Creating an avatar can be fun and engaging for games, but should not be your kids’ usual MO.

Relationship and Communication. Be nice. Define what this means. How your kids interact online should be consistent and should show respect, good manners, and integrity. Communication should be professional—using proper grammar and sentence structure.

Digital Footprint and Reputation. Your online presence remains. Make sure your kids know that future employers can find out a lot about a person from social media accounts.

Creative Credit and Copyright. Intellectual property refers to creations of the mind—inventions, literary and artistic works, and names and images used in commerce and inventions. It is important to teach your kids about copyright laws, plagiarism, and infringement of intellectual property. I have known established bloggers who have been sued for using other people’s photos (versus stock or free) on their site.

Teaching our kids manners in a digital age is something that we should take seriously. Information technology has provided us with vast amounts of freedom and opportunities. Regardless of what those freedoms and opportunities afford, it’s important for us to teach our children that good manners and kindness are always in fashion.