Dear fellow moms and dads,
Last time I wrote about the importance of respect as an expression of love among the people who shape a child’s upbringing. Not just any people, but the people who form what I call the happy love triangle around a child. That triangle consists of parents, educators/teachers, and creators of content for children — in other words: the home, the kindergarten or school, and the internet or other media.
Alongside respect, another expression of love among the people involved in a child’s upbringing is cooperation.
Cooperate with teachers and educators. Ask them questions, consult them, offer suggestions, and get involved. But not too much — and not in the wrong way. Because excessive or misplaced involvement can disrupt educational processes and even harm your child’s social development. I mentioned several examples of this in my previous text.
Cooperation between parents and educators is naturally two-way. But between them and creators of children’s content, it should ideally be three-way. In my ideal world, everyone would cooperate with everyone — including the children themselves.
The best cooperation, like true interaction, is multi-directional. Interaction between all participants exists anyway, whether we are aware of it or not. The real question is simply this: do we choose to turn that interaction into cooperation, or not?
As a creator of content for children — an actor, writer, and dramatist working in theatre — I often include children directly in what happens on stage. I collaborate with them (and with their parents!) during performances of Tata Slikovnica. Together we invent songs that are usually hilariously funny — and far more interesting than anything I could have written alone.
Those songs sometimes include nose-picking, fart jokes, and all sorts of topics you would never imagine could be turned into music. But they also contain magical verses that belong to the strange and beautiful realism of childhood imagination. None of that would be possible on my own. It only exists through cooperation with my audience.
Beyond the theatre, I also collaborate with children and parents online. I invite them to send ideas, opinions, and creative works related to the topics I explore in the Tata Slikovnica YouTube series.
A theatre performance is a live, performative experience, while a YouTube video is digital content. Plays, exhibitions, books, workshops, and playrooms are created by artists and educators. Digital media — films, social-media videos, games — are also created by people.
And both kinds of creators are, in principle, reachable. If we want them to be.
Digital content for children has become a civilizational reality. Today it influences children’s upbringing to roughly the same degree that the street once did, before the digital age.
In the past, parents tried to protect their children from the “education of the street” by enrolling them in music schools, sports clubs, and extracurricular activities.
Today, protecting children from digital content is almost impossible — because everyone carries their “street” in their pocket.
And to make things even more complicated, parents carry their digital worlds in their pockets too — which means they often spend less time with their children.
Personally, I find that there is no more entertaining content than one’s own child. My little girl and I have taken this idea one step further: we often record short videos together.
Parents used to do something similar with camcorders and magnetic tapes. They filmed birthdays, holidays, summer trips. No one saw anything problematic in that.
Today we have the tools to record moments every day — yet instead of creating together, we tend to see danger primarily in the videos children watch on platforms like TikTok when we’re not looking.
But the danger is not in the existence of video content on social media.
The danger lies in how and when it is consumed.
Is your child only a consumer, or an active participant?
My ten-year-old daughter loves drawing and crafting. She essentially educated herself in those skills through the very app many adults fear most: TikTok. She has watched hundreds of tutorials on how to draw, build, or make things.
Yes, she has also seen hundreds of pranks — the same kinds of playful tricks families used to play on one another. In our case, it even went a bit too far once when grandpa got seriously annoyed with us.
Leaving aside my own mischievous tendencies, the point is this: most of what my daughter knows how to create today she discovered through online tutorials.
How did she get there?
By spending years exploring social media together with us, talking about what is great, what is silly, what is interesting, what is useful, and what might be dangerous.
Yes, she has seen nonsense. She will see it anyway.
Is she fascinated by it? Is she drawn to it like some of her peers?
No.
And not because of strict parental control or surveillance — but because of a parent who acts as a partner.
Since we usually cannot collaborate directly with creators of digital content (you can hardly message someone and say, “Hey, could you make smarter videos? My kids are watching your stuff!”), what we can do is collaborate with our children in how they consume that content.
Over time, we become their filter, their corrective voice, or their inner compass.
Children actually adopt their parents’ criteria for interpreting the world surprisingly easily. If you forbid something entirely, children will simply use social media without you — and then you lose all influence.
But if you explore it together, they gradually adopt your perspective and judgment.
It’s quite simple.
The magic formula is not parental prohibition and not confiscating phones.
The magic formula is planning phone use and spending a certain amount of shared time together on social media.
Digital media is already entering classrooms in many ways. It can also enter everyday family life constructively.
Together you can learn how to bake the perfect pizza, repair a bicycle, or make Christmas decorations. While doing so — and occasionally talking about the dangers of excessive consumption of mind-numbing content — children begin to develop a critical relationship toward what they see online.
They start classifying content and developing their own internal compass for navigating digital spaces.
Reaching creators of live, performative art is actually much easier. You can call them, ask where a play is being performed, where a workshop is taking place, or when a concert or author event is happening.
The problem is simply that many parents feel they have very little time for such experiences.
Yet hardly anyone speaks about how important these live cultural experiences are for children’s development.
Unfortunately, I also notice that many schools in Croatia often neglect the performing arts — even though they are extremely important for children’s socio-emotional and aesthetic development. Cooperation between schools and live-content creators is often weaker than it should be.
The pandemic made the situation even worse, distancing children further from real-life experiences and from living, artistically shaped cultural content.
That is why I encourage you to take the time and explore children’s theatre together with your kids. Look for performances you might enjoy as a family.
Very often you will discover moments that make you laugh — or touch you more deeply than you expected.
Attend workshops organized by cultural centers. Visit exhibitions, storytelling events, concerts. Simply allow yourselves the adventure of exploring culture together.
In these ways — and many others — you can remain an active participant in your child’s upbringing and a true partner in their growing up.
Your child will learn from you how to respect authority (including you), how to communicate, how to choose digital content wisely, how to enjoy art in real spaces, and how to collaborate with others.
They will develop a sense of connection, cooperation, and shared experience.
Keep your educational love triangle happy — and enjoy it.
Because through that triangle your child develops healthy habits, a stable socio-emotional foundation, and an inner sense of harmony.
And those are some of the qualities that later make the difference between happy adults and adults who struggle with dissatisfaction in their lives.
Sincerely,
Igor