Living with a Foreigner

My daughter, a true New Yorker, often pokes fun at the quirky accent and idioms of her South African born mother. “Mom!! Waddya mean - don’t get your knickers in a twist?” But the truth is, I’m the one living with the foreigner.



My daughter inhabits a foreign world. She's never known a life without Google. She’ll never have to pace an agonizing hour at a photo lab to see how her snapshots turned out. Or constantly check the mailbox to see if her camp friends have written. And instead of waiting until the holidays to see her grandparents she can chat with them – or their pixilated images – every week on Skype.

That’s because my daughter, a '98 vintage, is a “digital native” [1] – a term that describes the generation of kids born into and raised in a totally digital world.

Major aspects of their lives—social interactions, friendships, civic activities—are mediated by digital technologies……They have created a 24/7 network that blends the human with the technical to a degree we haven’t experienced before, and it is transforming human relationships in fundamental ways.[2]

If you’re reading this you’re probably, like me, a “digital immigrant.” We’re the last generation to be raised solely in the analog world, a dying breed who still remember life before email and Facebook. I’m not sure about you, but I’m struggling to keep my digital adoption curve steep so I don’t become obsolete as a professional, and as a parent.

Unlike me, my daughter spends most of her life online without distinguishing between online and offline worlds. She’s constantly connected; expects information to be instantly accessible and malleable; music to be free, sharable and portable; her ideas to be publishable and has no qualms about living her life publically online.

As parents of digital natives, the internet is both exhilarating and frightening; exhilarating in the opportunities it provides our kids and frightening in the dangers it creates. It also means that we, as parents, have a serious responsibility:

There is a huge risk that we .... will fail to harness the good that can come from these opportunities as we seek to head off the worst of the problems. Fear, in many cases, is leading to overreaction, which in turn could lead to greater problems as young people take detours around the roadblocks we think we’re erecting.

Rather than banning the technologies or leaving kids to use them on their own in their bedrooms—two of the most common approaches—parents need to let Digital Natives be their guides into this new connected way of living.[3]

So, Ruby - I’m in your hands. Help me navigate this new world and, hopefully, we’ll both be the wiser for it.


[1]: Marc Prensky is acknowledged to have coined the term digital native in his work Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants published in 2001.
[2] and [3]: Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives, by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser.