Social media is getting more and more popular and with that, it is becoming hard to keep kids away from its adverse repercussions. So, whether your child likes to watch content, connect with friends, or even enjoys sharing memories with a post on their Instagram account. If this is the case, do not forcefully stop them as this can have a negative impact on them.
Instead, you should teach them a few rules about networking sites and educate them before you let them loose on the internet. Read ahead to discover some tips and rules to save your child from its harmful effects.
The exposure to social media has succeeded in blinding the eyes of the kids too. Unfortunately, we cannot fully control the amount of time social media is used, but we can ensure that our kids know the limitations to keep them safe.
Take a look at the rules that you should teach your kids and advise them to affirm them daily.
If you don’t have a household rule or parental controls set up to let your children know that a certain amount of social media is too much, then you need to teach them when to get off. Often, people who love surfing online can get into the habit of checking their accounts every hour, or sometimes even more than that.
The worst habit they can develop is the doomscroll, which is the act of mindlessly scrolling and clicking through content just to find something interesting to watch. It is important to teach your children the signs of spending too much of their time on social media on mental health, and show them how to budget their time.
While it can be tempting to keep refreshing the page or scrolling down to see if something new and exciting has popped up, you should show your kids that there is more to life than staring at screens. The best way to do this is by setting up an example for them.
If your teen wants to create content or wants to have a more active role on social media, then you should encourage this. But make sure that you are teaching them to add meaning to the world by creating compelling posts.
It can be very easy to get sucked into the world of influencers and make trending videos or follow the latest challenges, but that content tends to fade away quickly and be replaced by something else. However, the content that tends to stick around the longest is the content that comes from the heart and has a purpose.
Whether that is to entertain, inform or share a skill, the best content that your teen can put on social media is content that can bring people up, not tear them down.
Creating content surely has its plus points but everyone is a critic on social media! While some comments can be disregarded or ignorant posters not knowing what they are talking about, some people genuinely try to share constructive criticism on what your child has put out there.
To help your child deal with this, it is important to teach them how to accept criticism, see the value in it, and accept it with all dignity, rather than just disregarding the comments entirely.
You cannot predict what kind of content your child will see on Instagram. But you can surely teach your pal to not entertain such sensitive and dramatic content for the sake of fun or to join the league of what everyone else is doing.
You can simply narrate to them the harmful effects of forwarding these posts from your personal experience or in the form of a self-made story. Instructing the repercussions of encouraging fake people’s activities should be clear to them, so they can differentiate what’s posted on platforms for marketing and what is in real-time.
It might be tempting to post the location of the scenic view you have been exploring for the last few days. However, sharing the current location can be harmful to your safety concerns. Revealing that you and your family are on vacation can send an informal invitation to the robbers to attack your home.
In addition, disabling the automated uploading of your current location can be beneficial at some point.
Incorporating these ethics into your child’s life will help them to continue to use and learn the aspects of social media, and will also encourage them as they step out into the real world and interact with other people.
Media platforms are full of harmful people, and there are chances of getting affected by social media phishing and other cyber crimes. If your child has been cyberbullied, harassed, solicited, or personally harmed by someone on social media, there’s a lot that can be done legally to stop this.
The Dolman Law Group can protect social media victims from further harm by taking action. Social media lawsuits can be filed, and you can seek compensation to ensure that the companies and their users are brought to justice for the harm they have caused. Suing a media company or attempting to find the real identity of a harasser is no easy feat, but with an expert lawyer, you can be represented both in settlement negotiations and trials.
Social media might seem like a platform for criticism, but most of the time it is just a tool that your child needs to learn to use correctly and responsibly. Once they do, they can carve out their little niche on the web and show the world what they have to offer!
