Many parents already know that to protect their children from danger, they need to monitor their activities and remain in close communication with them.
But when it comes to social media applications – better known as apps – it’s a constantly moving target.
John Calvert, director of the Safe and Secure Schools unit of the Kansas Department of Education, was the featured speaker recently on the K-State Research and Extension series, Living Well Together. His talk was titled, A Parent’s Guide to Social Media.
“I tell people in my presentation that I’m not going to get political, but I am going to tell you the facts,” Calvert said. “The facts are that right now TikTok is the No. 1 most downloaded app since January 2020, and it’s the most dangerous. It’s the app that is most used by child sex traffickers out there.”
Calvert, who was previously a school resource officer, has sorted through hundreds of online apps and routinely monitors new apps to stay on top of the dangers they present to children.
“It has become apparent to me that these apps are targeting our kids,” he said. “That is how some kids base their self-wealth: how many followers do I have, or how many likes or shares do my posts get?”
Calvert noted that apps with chat features or those that allow users to create a fake profile are particularly dangerous.
“There are people out there that lie about their age, or about whether they’re male or female, and it’s all an attempt to get access to our kids,” he said. “With these chat features, we don’t know who our kids are interacting with and they don’t know who they’re interacting with.”
And kids, he adds, generally view people as being good: “So when they’re talking with a 13 or 14 year old male, and they want to go meet this person, all of a sudden they’re not looking for the 40-year-old who is standing right behind them.”
Parents are often torn between the dangers that exist and wanting to appease their children. Calvert’s own nine-year-old daughter recently asked him for a phone to interact on social media with her friends.
“This is the 2021 version of ‘Keeping up with the Jones’s,’ if you will,” Calvert said. “My friends have it and I have to be cool. If I don’t have a phone or social media, I’m an outcast. The problem is that there’s a ton of danger.”
It begs the question, then: What can parents do?
Calvert said some cell phone carriers have free apps to monitor what kids are doing, though youth have found ways to subvert the app. Another idea is to create a fake profile at the age and gender of your child to see in advance what they might be exposed to.
“People are going to interact with me differently on the app depending on who I am, Calvert said. “They may act a certain way around a 37-year-old male, and they’re going to act completely different around a 13-year-old female.
“I’m not there to be a predator on kids, but I want to see how people are going to interact and what areas and content I can view as a 13-year-old female. Because if I can see it, that means my daughter can see it.”
For youth who simply want to talk with their peers, an app called Kid Messenger allows parents to first approve their connections. The parents then have access to those conversations.
Calvert, though, said the best way forward is to establish open communication with your child.
“The main thing is this: we can not and should not be allowing our kids to have free access to anything and everything without some sort of conversation or monitoring,” he said, “because our kids have access to explicit content that we may not even know about.”
The Living Well Together series is a K-State Research and Extension program that originated during the COVID-19 pandemic to help families with such important topics as financial literacy, health and family relationships.
“We knew that more and more families and youth were spending time together at home due to the pandemic,” said Mirna Bonilla, a K-State Research and Extension wellness agent in the Chisholm Trail District, and one of the program’s organizers.
Calvert’s presentation, in particular, caught her attention: “I had not heard of more than 70 percent of the apps he talked about,”’ she said. “It is scary because it is constantly changing. We’ve heard about social media and how dangerous it can be, so we really wanted to provide this information to parents.”
A full interview with Calvert, Bonilla and Chisholm Trail District family and youth development agent Tristen Cope is available on the weekly radio program, Sound Living.