A white woman checked my privilege recently, and I’m glad she did.

She was presenting at an education writers conference at Stanford, where top experts discussed research on the academic achievement gaps between various groups of students. I asked her if there were aspects of the second-generation immigrant experience that could be valuable to helping lower-income students improve their academic outcomes.

I asked this as a child of working-class immigrants who came to America with very little, and who worked hard to raise six high-achieving children. We grew up on the outskirts of an upper-middle-class, mostly white suburb, where I frequently felt like an outsider.

The presenter asked me a few pointed questions:

-- Even though my mother didn’t speak English, had she been educated in her native country? Yes.

-- Even though we qualified for reduced-price lunches growing up, did we ever worry about our next meal? No.

-- Did my parents model the behaviors one needs to succeed in middle-class society? Yes.

-- Did we attend high-quality public schools? Yes.

In fact, our house was filled with books and high expectations, even though we were a working-class minority by race, ethnicity and religion. I certainly didn’t feel “privileged” in comparison to the wealthy white Christian families I grew up around, but looking back, I see that I was far more privileged than poor children in failing schools.

She helped me clarify my own assumptions: that it was primarily our hard work and learned values that got my siblings and me where we are. Those played an important role, of course, but there were unearned advantages that we benefited from, and it was naive for me to suggest that our experience could be compared to that of far more disadvantaged students.

It was after this conversation that I decided to approach the topic with my own middle-schoolers. We’ve always talked to them about the responsibilities that come with blessings and the importance of gratitude, but this was a different conversation. I wanted to help them see the difference between societal privilege, enjoyed by certain groups, and a blessing, a spiritual favor that can be bestowed upon anyone.

I also didn’t want my children to buy into the false narrative about their identity as American Muslims -- that they were either villains or victims, as so often portrayed in the media.

We talked about how power works in society. They are already aware that certain people are treated differently based on factors outside their control. So, there may be situations when they’ll be singled out while traveling based on their names or religious background. But there will also be times when they will benefit from certain characteristics -- whether it’s their gender, their socio-economic background, their skin color, their lack of disabilities or their sexual orientation.

We talked about what it means to use that privilege to work toward a more just society.

Nicole Hudson, the director of racial equity and priority initiatives for St. Louis Mayor Lyda Krewson, has taken a different approach with her own children, who are several years younger than mine. She will point out scenarios in which people in the same situation are treated differently -- by the police or the courts, for example -- and let them form their own conclusions.

Privilege is often about who gets the benefit of the doubt and who gets second chances, she said. Parents can explain to minority children that their white friends may not get in trouble (or to the same degree) for the same mistakes as them -- a reality borne out by history and years of data.

“Some people get a larger margin of error,” she said.

But she tries to avoid using the word “privilege” at all when talking about issues related to race or inequality.

“It’s a trigger word,” she said. “It so quickly shuts down the conversation” with some people, who see it as an attack. They assume they are being told they don’t deserve something or that their work didn’t matter. Or that they should feel guilty for something they couldn’t control.

“It becomes a debate about what they did or didn’t do, instead of helping them see a recurring systemic issue,” she said.

That defensiveness is learned, which is why I want my own children to recognize the ways in which they benefit from society’s power structures and the ways they don’t. More importantly, I want them to think about what they can do to listen to and lift up the voices of people who deal with challenges they won’t experience.

It was embarrassing to me that, as an adult, I failed to take into account the advantages in my upbringing before implying there were lessons in it for those less fortunate.

“You don’t see it because it was there for you,” Hudson said.

I had failed to separate the privilege from the blessings.

When parents start chatting about their tween or teenage children at a party, the conversation invariably turns to their anxiety about their child’s devices. So, it was a mother I met at a baby shower who told me about a fairly new app she was planning to use to keep on top of her teen’s digital life.

There are divergent schools of thought on monitoring apps: One group believes that keeping close tabs on their children’s every online move is a creepy invasion of privacy, and prefers to teach their children to independently make good choices. On the other end, there are parents who believe that children lack the emotional maturity and self-regulation to make good decisions all the time with technology, and require supervision until they are older and better equipped to control their impulses.

But keeping track of a child’s (or children’s) entire daily digital communication can seem like an overwhelming full-time job. Not to mention, there are secret codes and hidden apps that can be used to hide or disguise inappropriate content on a child’s phone.

In between these groups are parents who try to keep open lines of dialogue, keep a list of their child’s passwords and do random spot-checks on their devices.

There isn’t much good data on how many parents fall into each of these categories, although anecdotally, it seems to be about half who try to keep some kind of monitoring, even if just spot-checks, and half who are pretty hands-off.

This is where an app called Bark offers a different type of solution. It’s a subscription-based app ($9 a month for a family) that uses algorithms to scan a child’s phone for potentially harmful activity from bullying to sexting to mental health crises. When something is spotted through these filters, the parent gets an alert with the flagged content and advice on how to handle it with their child.

On one hand, it affords a child far more privacy, since all of their communication is not being watched or reported to a parent. Yet, it allows some measure of a safety net for parents.

Brian Bason, CEO of Bark, launched the company in February of 2016.

“Teens don’t understand the permanency of their online activities and the downstream effects they can have,” he said. Among their subscribers, 54 percent of kids have at least one issue per month that generates an alert for a parent to review. The vast majority of those parents, 80 percent, were completely unaware of the issue until they received an alert.

In some cases, they have been alerted about 10-year-old boys trying to download the dating app Tinder. But others have been more serious. There have been about two dozen situations in which a parent was alerted about a potentially suicidal child, Bason said. He said they see a large amount of cyberbullying, violence, threats and drug use, along with mental health concerns.

While the app can scan content over 20 different platforms on a child’s phone, there are things that can slip through the cracks. For example, not all “snaps” sent via Snapchat can be filtered. On Android phones, messages sent using WhatsApp cannot be filtered. On an iOS device, the content is captured when the device is connected and backed up to iCloud. On Android, the app is installed on both the parent’s and child’s phones.

While there are still some loopholes and the technology is evolving, this will help those parents who believe something is better than nothing. Ideally, this sort of careful monitoring service should be provided as an option to all cellphone subscribers through the monthly charges and fees that cellphone providers already charge.

For many parents, a child’s constant connectivity provokes a fear similar to when an adolescent starts driving, but unlike that rite of passage, there is no formal “digital citizenship exam” or learner’s permit that comes with the technology that connects them to the world and their friends. And yet, just like the potential risks that come with driving, there’s a legitimate worry that a foolish mistake could derail a child’s life.

Regardless of whether a parent is pro-monitoring, anti- or somewhere in between, it’s a relief that tech companies are continuing to find ways to help parents keep kids safer online.

Maryellen Pado started talking to her son when he was in elementary school about the responsibilities and risks involved with drinking alcohol. She had conversations with her children periodically over the years, so they would be prepared to make good decisions as adults.

And yet, the call still came during his senior year of high school: The cops had raided a party at a friend’s house, where he had been drinking.

“I was glad he told us the truth,” Pado said. “But I wasn’t sure what to say to him or to the parent who hosted the party.” That parent had provided alcohol to the underage drinkers.

Pado, who lives in the St. Louis area and works for Anheuser-Busch, turned to M.J. Corcoran, the parent coach who designed the company’s “Family Talk about Drinking” program. Corcoran says these conversations need to begin when children are young and evolve as they grow up.

When kids are younger, the focus should be on explaining clear boundaries and rules. When they move into tween and early teen years, parents should start asking more open-ended questions, such as: If you go to a party, and people are drinking there, what will you do? Ask kids how they might handle certain specific scenarios and situations.

As children get into later teen years and have more independence, the conversations should still include information about where a teen will be, what the transportation will be and who else will be there. Parents should share ways in which they can support a child’s decisions. For instance, come up with a word or emoji that can be texted if a teen find himself in an uncomfortable or unsafe situation and needs to be picked up. He or she may not be able to offer details in a phone or text conversation in front of friends. But the emoji could trigger a call back from a parent, who then says they are coming to pick up the child. This could help a teenager save face, and possibly, save a life.

Corcoran also says that parents need to sit down with each other and make sure they are on the same page before talking to their child. If one parent offers firm rules, but the other softens that stance later, it give a child mixed messages.

“Be very clear about what your beliefs are,” Corcoran said. “That will come through.”

And avoid a lecture at all costs.

“That won’t work,” she said. “That just shuts kids down.”

In Pado’s situation with her son, who is now a college student, Corcoran suggested having him research how alcohol affects a teen’s mind and body, and report back to his mom. Corcoran also recommended backing off a conversation with the adult who had provided the alcohol.

Pado told her son that even though he broke the rules in this instance, the rules still applied. They don’t allow underage drinking and insist upon following the law.

Pado had forbidden both her son and daughter from attending parties where alcohol was served when they were in high school. By their junior year, they informed her this would restrict them from attending any parties at all.

“You are saying ‘don’t go to parties,’” her son told her. She appreciated their openness and talked to them about staying away from alcohol and watching out for the safety of their friends. Her biggest fear was of them getting into a car accident.

“Remember, if you make a mistake, don’t make a bigger mistake after it,” she said. Before her son left for college, she talked to him about the different types of alcohol and how it’s impossible to know the alcohol content when people are mixing drinks at a party.

“You can’t just put your head in the sand and keep them locked in the house,” she said.