By Bri Brands 

As technology continues advancing and changing how to communicate, it’s easy for parents and teenagers to end up on different wavelengths. To help bridge that gap, two faculty members from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences created a workshop designed to help parents better connect with their children in today’s digital world.  

Rachel McLaren, associate professor in the Department of Communications, and Rachel Young, associate professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, combined knowledge in their research areas to help local parents learn practical strategies for fostering positive teen-tech relationships.

In fall 2024, McLaren received a Professional Development Award, allowing her a semester off from teaching so she could focus on sharing her research on parent-adolescent communication. It was during this time that McLaren approached Young about the idea of a collaborative workshop that combined both of their research areas. 

Young’s research is community engaged and focuses on parents’ perceptions of digital media and the processes that parents engage in to help manage their kids’ media use. As she conducted her research, she found that parents didn’t have the communication tools needed to productively discuss what their adolescents were experiencing online—which ended up being the perfect opportunity to collaborate with McLaren.

“It was a perfect marriage of my interests and the need that I saw for helping parents talk openly about digital media with their kids, and Rachel [McLaren]’s expertise in effective parent-child communication,” Young said. 

The initial workshop in fall 2024 welcomed over 30 participants, with the spring 2025 workshop welcoming about 10—some of whom were returners from the previous workshop. The spring workshop took place at the Iowa City Public Library, where McLaren and Young plan to host the workshop again this coming fall.

Parents signed up looking to hear about other parents’ experiences communicating with their teenagers and how technology can create challenges for parents.

“People were looking for a place to talk about these issues in a way that’s non-judgmental, that acknowledges the challenges parents are facing, but also the really good intentions and hopes that parents have for their teenagers, while also learning some practical research-based tips to help accomplish some of those goals they have,” Young said. 

The workshop was split into three main parts: understanding, connecting, and boundaries. 

The first part focused on understanding where a teenager is developmentally and the parent’s role as they navigate that development. McLaren explained that, because the limbic part of the brain develops before the frontal lobe, everything feels more intense for teenagers, which can be hard for parents to understand. 

“In order to develop from this dependent person to a complete adult, their brain has to go through so much transformation,” she said. “Teens need help from parents to build skills for navigating their increasingly complex world.” 

The second part focused on parents establishing a connection with their teenager so they can have conversations when their teenager encounters something challenging online. Parents were taught about bids, or little moments asking for a connection from someone else. For teenagers, this often looks like showing their parents something on their phone.  

“If you just lament about how they’re always on their phones, you’re missing the point of connection in which they’re inviting you to experience and to learn about something they care about,” McLaren said. “That helps to build those places of connection, because otherwise they’re not going to want to talk to us if we’re constantly criticizing and lecturing them.”  

The last part of the workshop was about setting boundaries with technology by establishing values and determining media rules that align with those values, such as having the entire family leave their phone in a separate room at night to ensure a good night's sleep. 

As parents navigate raising kids in a world completely different from the one they grew up in, it can become easy for parents to feel isolated and without support—which is exactly what McLaren and Young hoped to combat in the workshop. 

"Our observations and our feedback are that parents feel a lack of a safe, supportive, non-judgmental space to hear from each other and to share their own experiences and to connect,” Young said. “If you’re facing something really challenging, knowing that other people feel the same is powerful. Even providing a small space for that feels significant.”  

Following the success of the workshop, parents shared with McLaren and Young the new things they were trying with their children at home and how they were working more mindfully to build a connection.   

“That is the goal—not to flood people with information, but to give them something that sticks so that it's accessible in moments that can be fraught, emotional, or challenging,” Young said.