Social media is getting more and more popular, and is also getting accessed by kids who are younger and younger. Whether your child likes to watch content, connect with friends, or even wants to create content for others, you need to let them know a few rules about social media content before you let them loose in the internet world.
- Teach Them When To Get Off
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 social media can get in the habit of checking their accounts every hour or sometimes even more than that.
Or they get caught in the doomscroll of mindlessly scrolling and clicking through content just to find something interesting to watch.
Teach your children the signs of spending too much of their time on social media, 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.
- Teach Them How To Add Meaning To The World
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.
It can be very easy to get sucked into the world of influencers and making trending videos or following the latest challenges, but that content tends to fade away 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 or 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.
- Teach Them How To Accept Criticism
On social media, everyone is a critic! And while some of the comments can be disregarded as people being jerks 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.
In order to help your child deal with this, it is important to tell them how to accept criticism and see the value in it, rather than just disregarding the comments entirely.
While it can be a hit to the pride and can be discouraging to your child, being able to manage constructive criticism and learn from it is a skill that your child will continue to use and learn from as they step out into the real world and interact with other people.
Also Read: What is Social Media Phishing and How to Avoid It?
What if Your Child Has Been Harmed by Social Media Content?
There are harmful people on social media. Trolls, mean posters, and people who seem to complain about everything and make it their mission to rip people down instead of just leaving something they disagree with alone.
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 harm victims from further harm by taking action. Social media lawsuits can be done, and you can seek compensation to ensure that social media companies and their users are brought to justice for the harm they have caused. Suing a social 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 in trials.
Social Media Is A Tool
Social media might seem like the end all and be all of the entire world, 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 own little niche on the web and show the world what they have to offer!
