Trying to surveil your kid is a fool’s errand: in the same way you were able to fly under the radar of your parents’ watchful eye, your kids can do the same with you. It’s what being a kid is all about.

Raising children today is as hard as it’s ever been. Here are 8 parenting tips guaranteed to make your efforts easier (or at least give you some things to consider as you try to make your peace with cellphones and gaming consoles). 

Today’s parents are working out challenges as pioneers in a new digital frontier without guides or mentors and with a limited sense of the topography. To guide a child’s development today, parents need to engage with their children’s digital realities and teach them concepts there just like they would the physical world. 

A child’s digital dossier is created long before they are able to consent to their “image” being distributed to a global network of friends, family, and possibly strangers. Globally distributed and then integrated into a digital archive that stores, remembers, and shares everything across a lifetime. 

Humans have been creating children and struggling to raise them right for millennia. The overarching main goal that whole time? To create and refine a child who won’t embarrass you. And will take care of you in old age. That was true 100 years ago and it’s true today. 

Phones (all tech, really) need to sleep in a room separate from its users, just like cars do. It makes for the best kind of sleep for humans. And phones.

Without mentors or guides about how to parent in the digital age, people need resources! 

Today a question based on a slide I have in my current keynote: what will the humans who are the products of big data be like when they get older?

How long before Amazon Echo's Alexa is good enough to be the after-school nanny, asking about the kids' day and checking up on homework and offering ideas for a snacks or providing tutoring and entertainment?