How to Teach your Kids to Be Smart about Social Media?

There is no avoiding social media for most parents these days. According to ACMA, only 45% of 8-11-year-olds were using social media about five years ago! This proportion increased to 60% in 2018, with many of the platforms being age-restricted (generally for 13+)

So, if you are trying hard to cut down social media from your family’s life, there are some preventative ways to keep your children safe on social media platforms.

Psychologists believe that the key is awareness and education. The first thing you need t do is educating yourself, then pass this information onto your kids.

 How to Teach your Kids to Be Smart about Social Media?

1. Understanding the dangers of social media platforms

• Privacy

You need to understand all the privacy settings in place to help protect your kids. If you have kids, they should have a private profile and a limited personal information on social media platforms. ( including their phone number and address) Also, not accepting requests from strangers is highly recommended.

Privacy settings are different on every platform. Make sure to study them before using the platform.

• Cyberbullying

online bullying occurs even for primary students! Cyberbullying can come in many different forms, like harassment, unapproved photo sharing, hacking, public humiliation, exclusion, etc.

You must understand the different ways your kid can be victimized by online bullying, so you would know what to do.

• Sexting

Young girls are facing increasing pressure to engage in the exchange of nude pictures, known as ‘sexting.’ Some young girls are suffering as a result of social media, often the result of ‘negotiating photos’

It’s important to realize that sexting does not just threaten your kid’s privacy; it can also lead to anxiety, bullying, depression, and humiliation.

• Anxiety and Depression

While cyberbullying usually leads to emotional difficulties in kids, some studies imply that social media itself can begin anxiety or depression.

Spending 1 hour a day conversing on social networks decreases the possibility of being fully satisfied with life overall by nearly 14 percentage points. 

• Addiction

If your kids lose interest in other actions, become upset or anxious when they can’t reach social media, or become continually distracted by social media, they may have a social media or technology addiction.

There are easy ways to stop this from happening, though, you should know that just using social media a lot doesn’t consider as an addiction. The addiction is when their use of social media prevents and interrupts their ability to function.

Now that you have educated yourself on the threats of social media, it’s time to concentrate on the kids.

2-What your kids need to know about social media

• The dependability of posting

It can be a hard theory for children to understand – that their future selves may not want to broadcast the same personal data that they do right now. Make it easy for them, and if they can’t think of their future selves, remind them of their past.

Emphasize to your children the inescapable dependability of online posting and explain to them that what they post now could beat them in the future. 

• Having empathy for others

Educate your children about compassion and encourage them to see how their behavior on social media may influence others; this will prevent them from joining in online bullying behaviors.

• social media is not real

Children need to know that while social media profiles can be a representation of someone’s character, they are a very nicely curated one.

Notably, some photos can be damaging to young girls and set up nonsensical standards of beauty.

People don’t put up unattractive pictures of themselves, so merely there are pictures of beautiful people everywhere. This can affect your self-esteem, so having a perception that it’s edited and that it’s not real, and having that knowledge that it can change the way that you feel and what you see without even knowing it, is essential.

How parents can use social media?

Obviously, you are one of your children’s role model, so if you use social media platforms in the right way, children will learn it as well.

For example, if you are an Instagram user, you can use it for growing your business and earnin money. Then kids will learn about the benefits on using social media in the best way.

If you are a business or just want to earn money on social media, I recommend building your eCommerce store and sell easier than ever by using a service such as iLink.

With iLink you can build your dream online store store with ready themes and without needing any codes. Millions of people will see your products on Google, by adding product’s descriptions on iShop. Moreover, it offers beautiful and customizable design and lets you Change the color, font, design, etc.

Some features of iLink’s iShop service:

• Statistics
• Contact us page
• Direct shop button
• About us page
• Search in products
• Products slider
• 10 images for one product
• Seo ready
• Link products
• Related products
• Description for products
• Add categories
• Discount system
• Custom URL
• Currency symbol
• Background image
• Multi products style
• 24/7 support

Conclusion

Parents need to explain all the mentioned tips to their children and about the permanence of their posts, and the impact of their words. You should not rely on the school system to teach them these things, and sadly, social media safety is not being well addressed.

Summary

Article Name

How to Teach your Kids to Be Smart about Social Media?

Description

There is no avoiding social media for most parents these days. According to ACMA, only 45% of 8-11-year-olds were using social media 4 years ago! This proportion has now increased to 60%, with many of the platforms being age restricted (generally for 13+)

Author

Roman Sozonov

Publisher Name

ilink

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