The Urgency of Parents Digital Literacy to Prevent Their Children from Harmful Effects of Smart-Mobile Devices

Abstract

The development of digital technology affects many aspects of family life, including the way of parenting and childcare at home. This article aims to provide applicative steps for stakeholders and parents to have digital literacy awareness as an effort to protect children from the bad effects that can be resulted by gadgets use at home. In the past decade, working parents handed over the babysitting to a babysitter or housekeeper. Currently, parents give their children gadgets and internet-connected mobile devices, because the gadgets full of games and applications that attract children attention. A gadget is significantly kept children calm and fun to play at home without disturbing their parents. However, the parents have weak digital literacy in the context of educating children in the age of digital information. From several researches, there are some harmful effects that parents do not realize about gadgets in the hands of their children, such as the low of social interactions, addiction, radiation, pornography, obesity and cybercrime that threaten the children even they are at home. The solution offered in this article is a parents digital literacy education, which consists of five basic concepts: technology literacy, communication literacy, information literacy, digital parenting literacy, and dien literacy.