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Why Me, Why Now?

This chapter may or may not be relevant to you-and if you picked up this book to get straight to the "what do I do?" part of how to parent in a tech world, that's totally fine, and you might want to skip this chapter. My ego will not be offended.

If you do, however, want to get to know my why behind what I do and how I got to be where I am today, then these next few pages will support your quest in understanding me and my perspective.

The Short Version

I am part of the only and last generation to straddle the pre-social media and post-social media world.

I'm a mother.

I'm a survivor.

I've worked in the parenting/media/tech spaces for more than 20 years.

Over the past nine years alone I've served as the chief parent officer and chief marketing officer for Bark Technologies, an online safety company that helps protect more than seven million children across the United States, Australia, South Africa, and Guam.

I was born into an analog (noncomputerized) household with a childhood full of books and play like the generations who came before me.

I grew up experiencing a rapid technological evolution with connected tech, the Internet, and social media while I was actually "mature" enough to process and utilize it.

I was given incredible, unique opportunities to discuss these issues with experts much smarter than I across global platforms.

I've coached Drew Barrymore on how to keep kids safer online, I've covered teen texting and emoji slang with Steve Harvey, I've surfaced dangers of Snapchat to Good Morning America, and I've testified before legislators around the rate at which children are harmed online given our data at Bark. I've spoken with countless numbers of parents whose children have been harmed by unfettered and unmonitored access to tech, and I've been told I have a unique way of helping overwhelmed parents navigate this new parenting landscape with grace given my upbringing and experience.

My purpose on this planet is to help others. I sincerely hope this helps you.

The Long Version

All right, buckle up, here comes the longer story.

So, who am I? Well, my name is Titania Jordan. That's pronounced like the name Tanya or Tonya-and then stutter the T. Now try it out loud. Much easier, right?

Side note-I wish current Titania could go back and tell child Titania that her name is the coolest and it turns out the more unique your name is, the easier it will be to grab social media handles.

But back to the point: who is Titania Jordan, and why should I listen to her?

Good questions. Let's start with the first.

I'm going to go ahead and take you back to the beginning, like the actual beginning.

The Last True Childhood

I was born at the start of the awesome 80s in Tazewell, a very small town in the heart of Appalachia and the coal mining mountains of Virginia. And yes, that Tazewell-the one that gained fame in the March 2005 issue of Time Magazine1 for its OxyContin problem.

That's not how I remember it, though. Back then, it was bucolic in every sense of the term. Pleasant elements of country life appeared everywhere you looked, and if my memory serves me as well as a five-year-old's memory can, it was truly breathtaking.

Tazewell offered rolling hills and snowy fields and horses and wildflowers and unlocked doors and small-town church vibes and all that jazz. I'll never forget the taste of my first donut-it was glazed and in-freaking-credible. I've never had a donut that good and am confident I never will again. Many thanks to the church lady at the local (only) Baptist Church who opened my eyes to that baked goodness.

My father was a business-savvy, handy guy, and my mother was a "couldn't-hurt-a-fly" nurse. She, to this day, still ushers bugs out of the house gently on paper instead of crushing them with a shoe or swatter because.they have feelings and a family too.

A few rad years later, my younger sister came along. Apparently, I was incredibly jealous of her out of the womb-but funny enough, today she is now my best friend. We lived in a pretty incredible two-story colonial brick house that my dad built, and I attended the local public school (I think there was only one in the entire town) where I vividly remember watching Sesame Street as a group activity on a TV that rolled in on wheels, pretending to sleep during nap time, watching the mischievous kids get spankings for acting up, and spending lots and lots of time outside.

We had one television in our home with fewer than 30 channels of content to choose from, and the only things I watched on it were educational children's programming and MTV at night with my dad back when MTV was literally only music videos. We share a deep love of great music to this day.

I colored, played outside a lot, played with toys, and played with friends. My one best friend, a boy whose dad was the town pediatrician, had a massive Victorian house and cable TV. We watched shows like He-Man and She-Ra, which I most likely wouldn't have been allowed to watch at my house given the themes of magic and dark forces.

It's funny when I think back on the parental controls my parents had in their toolbelt.

(That means not many.)

But letting my sister and I know that we were not going to be a house where magic and dark forces were allowed clued me in to our household boundaries. So what did we do when we couldn't scratch that proverbial pop culture itch?

We just went next door! The fact that we weren't allowed to watch certain programs or play certain games or read certain books but our friends could meant that, well, we'd just go over to our friends' houses, right? Does this sound familiar with phones or video games or other media where you set a limit and someone else allows it?

Despite how it took place so long ago, it reminds me of a recent quote from a dear friend of mine, the founder of Protect Young Eyes, Chris McKenna. "Our children are only as safe as their friend with the weakest digital rules."

A few years later, my family moved from the tiny town of Tazewell to the big city of Atlanta, Georgia, when my dad got a new job. Let me just say that culture shock is real. Despite my young age, I knew things were different now. Much different.

We found a significantly smaller, one-story rental home, and my sister and I were enrolled in St. Martin's, a small private Episcopalian school. This must've been when I was around five or six years old. I noticed way fewer kids in my new class and a stronger emphasis on art and music. I absolutely loved it and attended pre-K through 8th grade at that beloved school.

Our Atlanta honeymoon was short-lived. Like so many marriages in the 1980s, my parents divorced shortly after the boxes were unpacked. Jackie (my sister) and I were still very young, and somehow, we understood that we were fiercely loved by both our parents. Despite the rift from our parents splitting, we still knew that everything was going to be okay. In retrospect, my parents weren't really the most compatible couple, so it was probably (ultimately) best for both of them. But this was a big event in my life. It still is. Not necessarily a negative. But impactful.

In our new setup following the divorce, in a two-bedroom, two-bathroom Buckhead apartment while with my mom (majority of the time) and a variety of nearby places while with my dad (every other weekend), we had only one television (in both homes) with just the basic channels. In fact, we had to literally turn a knob on the TV to change the channel or adjust the volume. At first, I think there were 3 channels, and then there were, like, 12 channels. And then cable came along, and there were a lot more. And then there was the Internet.

But today the media landscape is like taking a glass globe, shattering it, and all those pieces of glass are the fragments now with which you have to get people's attention.

And that's not just a TV screen. It's mobile devices. It's an iPad. It's everywhere.

Everybody's competing for everyone's attention, all the time. I mean, there are screens at the gas station now and screens built into the backs of seat headrests in luxury vehicles. Everywhere you look, screens large and small are competing for your attention.

I guess that's one of the reasons I enjoy branding, design, and copyrighting-because you have to constantly be going to the next level to figure out how to capture somebody's attention as there's such a fight for it. The competition for your eyeballs is fierce.

No matter what I'm doing, I'm always cognizant of how I'm talking to people and how I can say something differently in order to stand out.

But yeah, back to my childhood. No cable. No computers. No car phones (until my dad got one, but we sure as heck weren't allowed to use it-those minutes were expensive!). No camcorder or VCR. We did have a stereo that could connect to local radio stations and play records and tapes. We did get a CD player once they became mainstream and more affordable. We also had magazine subscriptions to publications like Parents and Highlights that my lovely grandparents paid for, as money was tight (divorce will do that). I was a curious kid, and I wanted information....