How Do You Teach A Kid To Be ‘Good At The Internet’ Now?

This year, my 9-year-old daughter was assigned her first research report at school. She was excited to learn new facts about her topic, and she was very glad she’d been partnered with a specific boy in her class — not because she had a crush, but because she’d identified him as “very good at the internet.” The phrase rang through me like a bell when she said it, or maybe more like a dial-up tone: I saw visions of myself only a few years older on my parents’ computer, playing Myst and typing “a/s/l” into chat boxes. I saw myself a few years after that in the early days of Facebook and then Twitter, fearlessly sharing dumb jokes with strangers.

I asked my daughter what “good at the internet” means to her, and she explained this boy knows which websites to use and how to phrase a search so the results make sense. The reverence with which my 9-year-old complimented her classmate’s skills shocked me into the now-obvious revelation that “the internet” I grew up with as an elder millennial is wildly different from the one she’s starting to navigate — and the same one many adults are still trying to figure out. (Cut to me in this current moment scrambling to determine which posts on Instagram and Threads are real, and which news sites owned by which tech scions are biased in which way.) I realized I didn’t know where to start to help her become “good at the internet” or even what my definition of it should be. But like so much in parenting, I could see the process had already started without me.

Being digitally literate today is about far more than what we were taught as children: how to stick a floppy disk into a drive, how to type at a certain speed, or how to cite websites in a bibliography. Now what’s required is a complicated alchemy of technological fluency, critical thinking, media awareness, and creative problem solving. It’s knowing which websites are real or phony, discerning when a phrase sounds less (or more) than human, and intuiting how to wield an endless list of tools across a growing collection of interfaces. The National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE) considers “the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, create, and act using all forms of communication” to be an essential skill for the 21st century. But right now, Americans are fighting an uphill battle. And as of 2023, one-third of U.S. adults lack the digital skills to be a part of the modern economy, which includes the ability to find and use information on the internet. And in 2023, digital literacy among eighth-graders dropped to below 2018 levels and in some areas, below an international standard.

One reason for this drop is presumably that “the internet” itself is making it harder and harder to know what information to trust and take in. Meta has gotten rid of fact-checking on its platforms, a federal appeals court killed the potential of internet providers to act like utilities and provide equitable support for all websites, and generative AI is spouting streams of non-consciousness across social media and the open web. These are dangerous trends when 39% of adults under 30 get their news from TikTok, and more than 50% of all adults say they often get news from a digital device. And the stakes are even higher for kids; Surgeon General Vivek Murthy advised that social media presents an urgent threat to teens and 13 is still too young to be on those platforms. Experts believe that education is key to pushing back against the misinformation that is rampant online — but who would do this educating? Teachers themselves are woefully undertrained in the realities of an AI-driven world, even when Common Sense Media reports that 7 out of 10 teenagers in the U.S. have already used generative AI tools.

Right now, we’re all confronted with a digital ocean wider and deeper than it’s ever been before. And as parents, what can we do to help our kids swim in it safely?

When she’s explaining the path toward digital literacy for kids, Laura Ordoñez often thinks about her father. She and her dad were eating together when she mentioned taking her son to a baseball game. Her dad warned that kids wouldn’t be allowed in the stadium anymore — he’d read an article about it. Ordoñez thought that sounded absolutely ridiculous. She asked to see the article, and then tried to walk her father through a process of questioning and discernment. “Look at the website — I’ve never heard of it, and it doesn’t look well put together. Look at the date — it’s April 1. It was a joke,” Ordoñez remembers. “It’s very much the same with kids: teaching them to question everything.”

Ordoñez is the head of digital content at Common Sense Media, a nonprofit that provides research, resources, and advocacy around safe media for kids and families. The nonprofit offers a free digital citizenship curriculum that schools across the country have used in their classrooms, and resources about digital well-being for parents as well. As the mom of a 16-year-old herself, Ordoñez understands the fear parents feel around digital spaces.

While many parents’ first instinct is to jump in and set up parental controls immediately, Ordoñez says there’s one step that’s often forgotten: having age-appropriate conversations with your kids about how to approach different devices and platforms and why. Limits and rules are useful, and they will be individual to each family system. But Ordoñez suggests we make this conversation a more collaborative one — bring kids into the process in a way they can understand. This way, limits feel less punitive and authoritarian. “The idea isn’t to just shield them from something,” Ordoñez says. “It’s to teach them how to slowly scaffold the skills to be able to navigate these spaces.” Of course, initiating ongoing, contextual discussions is far more work than simply tapping some buttons on some devices, but Ordoñez says it may be far more effective in the long run.

Pat Yongpradit believes that the key to understanding how to use technology is learning how it works and, even better, learning how to make it. As the chief academic officer at the nonprofit Code.org and lead of TeachAI, Yongpradit runs programs to train new computer science teachers and provide computer science and AI curricula to schools. He argues that most kids can learn about AI in an age-appropriate way, and it’s important that they do because the technology has already become deeply integrated into the digital landscape. “Kids should understand that AI is not human and does not think like a human,” he says. “The voice coming out of the box wasn’t recorded by someone, is not someone — understanding that means they won’t just believe everything that [it says].”

The challenge is that, according to a 2023 National Parents Union poll, only 16% of parents understand AI. This is where trained teachers and nonprofits would ideally come in. Code.org, for instance, offers curricula on training an AI model and creating your own chat bot that includes not only the technical side, but the ethical considerations and the societal impacts, too. “When they understand how AI really works, they’re able to use it safely, effectively and responsibly,” says Yongpradit.

As of 2024, only 60% of public high schools and 37% of middle schools in the U.S. offer any computer science courses. But those numbers may be growing, as more than half of states have instituted legislation to establish media and digital literacy educational standards.

My daughter’s research report was for social studies, but as a San Francisco public school student, she takes computer science too. She even goes to a computer lab and gets to play games when she’s completed her assignments as I did years ago. But the similarities stop there. She’s starting to learn simple programming, and did a lesson on how to tell if a website is trustworthy; I feel lucky our city’s public educational system is taking the lead with her. But after talking with Laura Ordoñez at Common Sense Media, I’ve also started chatting with her about the internet instead of hoping that’s a project for a more grown-up age. “It’s about looking at those natural moments that you already have with your kids,” suggests Ordoñez, “in the car, or riding bikes together. It’s the same way you’d ask how their day was. The reality is what kids want from their parents is a connection and an understanding.”

My daughter and I talk about AI when she uses the DJ feature on Spotify. When she triple texts friends on the iPad, we talk about communication etiquette. And we discuss lies and truth when we search the internet for answers to her infinite animal queries. I hope I’m doing a good job, but as always in parenting, I can’t know for sure. She hasn’t declared herself “good at the internet” just yet, but maybe she’ll make someone else glad to be her partner for the next report.

Rebecca Ackermann is a writer and designer living in San Francisco. Her work has appeared in MIT Tech Review, Esquire, Vox, and elsewhere.