With a teenager and a pre-teen in the house social media is something that plays a big role for me as a parent. Especially in regards to education surrounding the safe use of social media. I'm a big believer in the idea that we cannot shield our children 100% from social media. It is a huge part of the world now and only seems to be growing bigger each and every day. I believe it is therefore necessary that we allow our children to use social media while teaching them how to safely navigate it.
One of the biggest things we talk about it what to share, and how much to share. Now I realise this is a bit silly saying in an online blog but, we do need to take care in what we post. Once something is out there, you can't bring it back in. The other main thing I speak to my girls about here is whenever you share something online, no matter what it is, you need to be prepared to receive negative feedback. Not everyone is always going to agree with you, or like what you post and there are some people out there who seem to get joy in bringing down other people. For me it's not always about teaching my kids to filter this out, sometimes it's about having a healthy discussion with someone else about their view. You never know what you may learn about the world, and even about yourself by doing this.
The other huge topic we talk about is how easy it is to be not true on social media. Between filters on photos and the ability to hide your true identity, not everything is always as it seems. Many teens now get a significant portion of their self-worth from feedback they receive about their appearance online. They want to look like all those people they see who look perfect. The problem with that is 90% of these people don't look like that. The photos are staged, photoshopped, and filtered. Their lives don't look like that. We have control over what we post online and so we have control over what image we present to the world. This isn't always the truth.
Something that comes up with this issue time and time again is "perfect" parents. Those parents who only ever seem to post perfectly clean children doing perfect crafts while everyone is smiling. Where teen girls feel bad that they can't look like all the models online, this can also cause parents to feel they are not good enough. Crafts are messy and when my kids were little, crafts didn't always involve smiles from everyone. The perfectly clean homes can make the rest of us feel like we are failing because our houses look like a toy shop as thrown up in them. I'm not saying that these sorts of things shouldn't be posted, but there should be a balance. It's ok to share the bad in your life too. Everyone has bad in their life. You sharing that you are struggling might just help someone who is reading your posts. They may see that they are not alone in their struggles. That it's normal to not be happy and love each and every minute of being a parent. We need to normalise the hard stuff. We need to normalise sharing our feelings. We need to remember the old saying of "A problem shared is a problem halved". We need to stop pretending to be something, and someone we are not.