Kids online: Parents need to strike a balance

Saad Al-Dossari

Parents in the digital age have some kind of a love-hate relationship with social media.
Some of them do realize that these applications and websites are the language of the day and there is no way to keep children, adolescents, and teens away from it, while others see nothing but evil in these networks and decide to ban them altogether.
Between those two extremes raises the questions on how parents should be dealing with the social media phenomenon.
The answer may seem so easy and yet so complicated. “It is all about balance,” a classical example on how somethings are easier said than done!
Words such as ‘ban’ and ‘forbid’ no longer apply to this century parenting.
In a world where everything and everyone is connected to the Internet, it is next to impossible to enforce banning or forbidding youngsters from using it.
Actually, we could be harming them more than we think we do by guarding them away from the Internet.
I believe we all want our children to enjoy raising questions and to have curious minds about life, science, and ideas. The Internet is an imperative tool to feed that curiosity and keep their passion about knowledge alive.
Nevertheless, opening the door wide open for them to share anything, to do everything on social media is a grave mistake. We should avoid this at any cost.
Over attachment to social media could subject adolescents and teens to a wide range of dangers and psychological traumas.
A 2014 National College Health Assessment, a survey of about 80,000 college students throughout the US “found that 54 percent of students reported experiencing overwhelming anxiety in the past 12 months and that 32.6 percent “felt so depressed that it was difficult to function” during the same period.
The study also found that 6.4 percent had “intentionally, cut, burned, bruised or otherwise injured” themselves, that 8.1 percent had seriously considered suicide and that 1.3 percent had attempted suicide,” reported the CNN.
Beside that, getting used to communicate solely through social media most of the time strip our kids away of the very basic communication and social skills they need to live through their lives.
“As a species, we are very highly attuned to reading social cues,” says Dr. Catherine Steiner-Adair, a clinical psychologist.
“There’s no question children are missing out on very critical social skills. In a way, texting and online communicating (is) not like (creating) a nonverbal learning disability, but it puts everybody in a nonverbal disabled context, where body language, facial expression, and even the smallest kinds of vocal reactions are rendered invisible.”
Now, striking that magical balance between social media and kids lays before anything else in our ability to talk to our children, to befriend them, to build the confidence and trust they need to open up to us.
Then, there is our own online behavior. What kind of information we share online, what sort of interactions and attitudes we usually demonstrate in the cyber world are all influencing factors on how our children may perceive social media.
If our eyes are glued to the phone on the dinner table, do not expect anything else out of the children; if the language we tend to use to express our opinions are foul and aggressive, do not expect our children to do the opposite.
In a way or another, having a responsible online behavior ourselves is the key to guiding our children to do the same.

— Saad Al-Dosari is a Saudi writer based in Jeddah.