Should I allow my children access to social media?
How many times do you second guess a post before you click share?
Do you imagine your child, family members, friends and enemies seeing it and ponder their reaction before you create the post or only once you’ve clicked that share button?
As a rule, if you wouldn’t say or do what you’re doing on social media in real life don’t do it on social media! It’s as easy and simple as that.
Maybe an unpopular decision, but my children do not have TikToc or social media accounts and that will remain the case for as long as I feel it’s safer for them or until the point, I feel they are mature enough and have sufficient knowledge to be able to handle a potential social media disaster.
My son was allowed TikToc at one point which I swiftly deleted after an alert from the school regarding a video on there promoting and showcasing suicide!
We have told them how sometimes bad people can use social media as a mask to pretend to be a friend your age and trick you into giving them information that could lead to a bad situation. To bring home this message I’ve shown them a portion of the programme catfish where people have started online relationships sometimes speaking with this person for years online to find out the blue eyed 25-year-old girl you thought you were talking to is in fact a 45-year-old male who once met offended at a bar and became obsessed with your every move and plotting their revenge on you.
I think it’s important to give children real situations they can attach to a message you’re trying to teach them, because let’s face it they don’t always believe that mother knows best! They want and require evidence to support your rules and rants.
We’ve discussed how innocently adding a location to a message or social media post for someone who you don’t know well to see, is telling them exactly where you will be that day. And that it could potentially be the same as sticking a tracking device on your head and saying come get me!
It’s always safer and best practice if you are tagging a location or making it abundantly clear where you are, to do this once you have left that location.
Obvious right? Nope not if you’re a teenager wanting to prove something/show off to your friend at that specific moment in time to potentially gain instant gratification, for your wavering hormone driven lack of confidence.
It always feels such a shame to burst their naive bubble and tear off those rose-tinted glasses and let them know they are not invincible to “bad people”. In an ideal world you want them to only experience the good in life. But I’d much rather prepare them for the flipside a little younger, help give them the tools and the confidence to know a bad situation or an encounter with a degenerate doesn’t have to be the end of the world. It can then be reframed into just an unwelcome crappy hurdle you can jump over and move on with your life.
Can you remember the first time you realised not everyone was going to be your friend and be cheering for you when you crossed the finish line?
Was it maybe getting picked on at school and a peer explaining to you that it was probably because you had something that person wanted and their jealously made them treat you wrongly? Was it when you got 1st place and your best friend got 6th only to see them drop off the face of the earth and not want to be around you anymore? This is not just relevant to social media this is a life lesson we all eventually need to learn!
In my opinion for every 10 people supporting your wins and triumphs there will be 3 trying to bulldoze them and take you back down!
Why though mum? why do people not want to be happy for you and celebrate with you? The answer is within them not you.
When someone achieves more than you in something you want to excel at, it strikes a chord with you if you’re not doing what you need to be doing yourself to achieve the same outcome as them. You are in fact angry that YOU are not putting the work in yourself, not at them! You are projecting your feelings about yourself onto them because it is so much easier than holding yourself accountable. Let’s face it emotional maturity and self-awareness takes a long time sometimes a lifetime to achieve and some people never get there.
If you feel that pang of jealously and the urge to pull them off their pedestal stop, take a moment look within and question why it bothers you so much!
I am happy to say I now instinctively do this more than I ever have before, and it has become second nature. I owe this to ample amounts of lockdown reading and lessons I’ve learnt over the years. I sometimes still need a second to check myself, but mostly I just know that trying to take away from someone else’s fortune doesn’t stop your misfortune. Your actions and choices are to blame 99% of the time so change them!
This can seem near impossible especially if you are someone who has been stuck in a self-pitying mindset for as long as you can remember, and you literally need to retrain your thought processes. It’s like learning any new habit have patience and persistence and it will become natural to you.
I’ve covered this in such depth as social media trolling and online abuse can be in my opinion a version of jealously and low self-esteem from others projected on to you with their comments.
If you choose to allow your children access to social media and you have helped instil these lessons in them it will hopefully not have such a detrimental affect on their mental health and will be no more than an unwelcome comment they can brush off and move on from.
I am in no way condoning the reasons behind peoples disgusting, abusive social media behaviour and am fully aware that sometimes there are much more extreme scarier reasons behind the abuse. But as with most things in life there will always be a downside that you have to be aware of and all we can do if we decide we want to be vulnerable on social media, is to do it as safely as we possibly can or delete it and eliminate the possibility all together.
Either way you can wrap your children in cotton wall, clingfilm, bubble wrap and not let them leave the house until they are 18. Although I think unfortunately, all you will do is stunt their emotional growth and make them feel as though they do not have the ability to handle such situations when they arise even as an adult.
The flip side of not allowing them to have social media until they are an adult is they will potentially get to an age where, they may be the only person in their friendship group who is still not allowed access to social media and the unwanted behaviours and bullying begins because of this instead.
What do we do in that situation? Well, unfortunately I don’t have all the answers, but I would like to think I would approach it the same way as bullying for any reason. Speak with the children, the school anyone involved and remind my children that they are completely within their rights and it’s healthy to distance themselves from anyone who doesn’t benefit them emotionally and that I will support them in that decision wholeheartedly.
My mum mantra on social media
Try to be open and honest with the reality of social media you are their parent, and you have a responsibility to assess when you think it would be appropriate for them to have social media privileges. When they do hopefully you can agree on an open book policy where you will be able to keep an eye on their accounts in case of any issues. Better still try and help them focus on all the things life has to offer outside of social media.
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