Removing teens from digital spaces will push youths to darker corners of the internet, where they will feel isolated and excluded.
Digital skills are life skills. Much like how we teach financial literacy and road safety to our youths, we should do the same for digital literacy through guided exposure with parents.
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00:00As a mother, why do you believe guided early exposure for youth is the smarter path towards building discerning resilient digital natives and talents for tomorrow instead of totally banning it?
00:11I know you've been talking about guided step-by-step levels of exposure, but just in general, why do people need to understand maybe banning it in total for 16-year-olds and below is not the best solution?
00:24Right. I think the first thing we need to agree with is the fact that digital skills are life skills, right?
00:31And when we talk about guided exposure, we're not just guiding them to exposure about harmful content.
00:38We're not saying that we need to guide them to look at pornography, for example.
00:42But if you look at social media in a tunnel perspective and you only see the harms, then that might be your perspective.
00:50But you also need to look at the fact that children will grow up to become teenagers, to become adults who need to have the resilience over, for example, financial scams.
00:58They need to know what are the red flags out there that they should look out for.
01:02They need to look out for people who might be bullying them, who might be scamming them, who might be grooming them.
01:08These are things that maybe you can have conversations with them.
01:11That does work, but it is a lot better if you hold your hand through the entire process.
01:16Now, let's not look at it in a way where you say, oh, you just want to expose your kids to risk and then, you know, hope for the best.
01:23No, we're talking about parents taking that journey together with the child.
01:28I don't know what the actual nitty-gritty details are of this below 60 band.
01:33I don't think we all have the details yet.
01:35But I hope that it is tailored as well to the household and to the child.
01:42Because, I mean, teachers, you probably agree with me, our kids are not the same.
01:47You don't, you know, pop out kids who are alike.
01:50Some of them are not even like you.
01:51There might be those who are a lot mature at the age of 16 when there is compared to their siblings.
01:57Hopefully, parents know best on what these child should be expected to do or what their expectations are.
02:03And I think the responsibility needs to be placed back with the parents as well.
02:07And to answer your question, why guided exposure is something that I am advocating for,
02:15it's exactly because of the fact that you gain life experience from living it.
02:19And you need to gain digital experience from being in the digital space,
02:23guided by the safeguards that the platforms have given,
02:25and also guided by the parents who are there to supervise it all the way through.
02:30Okay, and what's Fina, your think on it?
02:33Like, for the guided exposure?
02:35Okay.
02:37When I heard about it, yeah.
02:39Like Puan Madiha said, I mean, kids are users, but they are digital natives, you know.
02:45They will work around the system.
02:47They will find ways.
02:48Yeah.
02:49They will find ways.
02:50Definitely, they will find ways.
02:51And when that happens, and when they are online,
02:55they are not just online, but they are online unprepared, unguided.
03:00That is more dangerous.
03:03And to me, it's like, if we block them, we are not just, we are not removing anything.
03:09We are just delaying it.
03:10We are just delaying the problems.
03:14So...
03:15One more thing.
03:16Yeah.
03:17Today, we focus a lot on TikTok because it's TikTok.
03:20But, you know, when you ban TikTok or you ban certain platforms or apps, et cetera,
03:26there is a host of other alternative platforms that the kids can go to that are not as regulated,
03:33that don't have community guidelines or all these safety features that TikTok has invested in for $2 billion, for example.
03:39So, what are we doing with those alternatives?
03:42We don't want to chase youths away into the dark corners of the web where no one is watching or no one is supervising as well.
03:49So, that's a consideration that we need to think about as well.
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