Part iii: The steps to take to keep your social media addiction in check and a protective filter over your kids
If you’re the regular companion of a small child I dare you to admit you haven’t at one time or another thrust a device into that child’s hands for just 5 minutes of peace. Perhaps if Mrs Large and Jill Murphy put their heads together and found a way for elephants to use smart phones she would’ve got more than 3 minutes and 45 seconds of kid-free uninterrupted bliss?!
What does that mean for the way we live? Where our kids are exposed to unadulterated screen time in the house and out of it. This very point raises the issue of how we are a society of addicts. Our vice may not come in a bottle or a line of white powder but it still has the capacity to bankrupt us and ruin our personal relationships (Afterpay… I’m just saying!) In all seriousness, with the advent of smart phones and their larger cousins, the tablet (larger than a paracetamol but a million times more addictive), we are a society obsessed.
#kidsoninstagram
When it comes to being addicted to technology, one of the main outlets for that is social media? We the #momsofinstagram are channelling that tree in the proverbial forest because if our 5,436 followers didn’t see our emotional breakdown during the latest episode of Love Island, well then, did it really happen? But, while it may be fine for us to post the minutiae of our days for public consumption, what line should we be drawing when it comes to our children?
Should there be a regulating body for #instamoms and #igdads? As the EU embraces, reluctantly or otherwise, the new GDPR data protection act putting tighter restrictions in place around the dissemination and use of our personal information; shouldn’t the same be applied to our kids?
Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat and the rest are a breeding ground for personal information sharing. So short of setting our accounts to private (oh the actual horror), what can we do to ensure the happiness of the #mamarazzi and the safety of our #igkiddies?
- don’t tag locations unless it’s glaringly obvious because an iconic landmark is in the picture
- don’t post pictures that feature your kids’ school or day-care centre
- don’t post pictures of your kids in their school uniform
- on that note, no naked pictures either, save it for the family album
- monitor who’s following you/commenting on your pics and block where necessary
Speaking to Tony Vizza, Director of Cyber Advocacy Asia Pac, ISC² it also becomes clear that nurturing this dependence on social media as an extension of daily life could prove more detrimental to our kids than we realise. “My biggest problem right now, is kids (especially of the teen persuasion) doing really silly things and posting it on social media,” says Tony, “not realising that further down the track future employees will see it and they will be held accountable for past action when seeking employment.”
When their parents are as reliant on social media validation as they are, who can kids turn to for a better example? The simple truth is that what you post now could hurt you later as employers recognise the key role social media plays in people’s lives. So whether it’s the embarrassing picture you posted of your kid to elicit some laughs or that YouTube video of you making racist jokes that one time in 1994 (I’m looking at you John Alexander); the internet never forgets.
“If you’re under the age of 25, there’s a good chance you’ve shared a picture of your private parts with someone else online,” says Tony. “What’s a future employer’s going to think? Well, if they have such little regard for their own privates, how can we trust them with private company data?” The point is that growing up in a world that’s increasingly blurring the lines between virtual and real life, we need to treat them as though they were one and the same. So if you wouldn’t let your toddler walk down the street in the buff, don’t share it online. If you’d be ashamed to make a racist joke at a party, don’t channel it into the ether.
The Terrible Teens
Not unlike the terrible twos, the teen equivalent in the digital age involves a far broader reach than Dad’s Playboy, a visit to Anne Summers and a fuzzy VHS. As kids get older, girls and boys, it gets more difficult to limit their online activity without driving a wedge between parent and the trust their child has in them. So what can we do to keep our kids in check without creating a Brexit situation in our own homes?
Rather than forbid, because we all know how well that works out (hello after school special) the best idea is to monitor from afar. Don’t let the juvenile theatrics of Leslie Mann and her fellow Blockers influence you, unless of course you detect particularly unsettling online activity in which case by all means rain all over their parade.
Make sure you’re the administrator of their laptop or device, which means you’re in control of installing the applications you want them to use and you can monitor their activity from afar. “The last thing you want to do is restrict them to the point that they go searching for certain content elsewhere,” says Tony. “Off they go to their mate’s house for an afternoon of soccer and a spot of porn-surfing and you lose all control.”
For those kids whose schools include a laptop levy into the annual fees, the likelihood is that the school itself will be the administrator which assumes that there is a relatively stringent level of security in place.
When all is said and done, living in a digital age where innocence dies the minute they join Facebook, the best we can do as parents is be present and model the behaviour we’d like to see in our children. So, perhaps that means limiting our own screen time and making family time more dynamic and rewarding to provide a real incentive to the digital alternative. It’s not easy, I should know, but isn’t it worth a try?