“Come down for breakfast! It’s all ready!” a mom hollered up the stairs to her 8-year-old daughter. No response. She screamed again.  “I’m busy playing a game on the computer,” the daughter screamed back. Sound familiar?

Beata Wickbom, moderator of a conference on digital communication at the Swedish embassy Nov. 10, told this story to explain how young children are spending more time online.

Nine Whitman students acted as “digital guides” at the event in Washington, D.C.,  showing older professionals and educators how they used social network websites, blogs, games and YouTube to communicate with each other.

The Swedish embassy invited Whitman students to participate in the conference because a Swedish cultural coordinator at the embassy has a daughter in the ninth grade at Whitman, Wickbom said.

“It’s always really great for students to learn in a different kind of atmosphere,” said assistant principal Brandi Heckert, who supervised the trip. “They had a chance to talk about something like the Internet, which they know so much about, but with different people than just their peers.”

The Swedish media council has hosted six similar conferences in Sweden over the past two years, where children have shown adults how they used online tools. Because the conferences were successful in Sweden, the embassy tried a similar event in D.C., event organizer Martina Wagner said.

“Children these days seem to know everything about living online,” Wickbom said. “But, as young people struggle for independence, adults have their role to play. If the web is like a country of its own that only children know about, then the children and the parents will have a hard time communicating with each other.”