Navigating the world of social media, the internet and tweens and teens is tricky for parents. As a parent who works with some social media platforms every day I see the good and the bad of Instagram and Twitter, but I am pretty clueless about Snapchat and TikTok. Snapchat worries me a lot as the messages are deleted so its much harder to check if it’s being used in a safe way.
I tried to avoid my children being online for as long as possible, but once they reached the minimum age for certain apps it became very difficult to say no as I felt like they were missing out on socialising outside of their phones too! The realisation that I had to teach my children how to navigate the online world safely rather than hide it from them took quite a long time! Setting up parental controls is also quite a task.
Before I had a teen who uses social media I didn’t think I would need a course on E-safety, but I’ve realised I don’t know as much as I thought and teens use social media in a very different way to adults. My warnings and advice are also often ignored so the course has been great for reassuring me that I am doing and saying the right things without overreacting.
It’s been brilliant that my children’s schools also give the same advice as me and actively encourage parents to check children’s phones sporadically as well as asking parents and kids to stick to the age limits on apps and games. It think it’s brilliant that E-safety is part of the National Curriculum and completely normalised as something we should all be thinking about. Even my Year R child has been taught about passwords and not trying to guess other peoples which is a great introduction to starting to think about using technology responsibly and safely.
The definition of E-Safety is the safe and responsible use of technology. It’s not just social media, but also text messages, gaming and even e-mail. It can be a difficult world for adults to navigate as well as children especially when emotions run high. Cyberbullying must be a particularly horrific thing to endure for both children and adults. The world seems very different to when playground problems could be left at school to be forgotten about the next day.
I don’t envy our young children at all. Mine laugh when I tell them about when we had to wait for the internet to dial up, and the time at University when we had the world’s longest phone cable so we could switch it between rooms, but actually the freedom of not having constant access to information and people may have been a good thing.
I’ve come to the conclusion that the best way I can approach keeping myself and the children safe online is to be an informed as possible, even if that means signing up to TikTok 🙂