Is social media broadening children鈥檚 horizons and opening up new opportunities? Or is it undermining their confidence, creativity and attention spans?
The minimum official age for use of Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Snapchat is 13, yet three-quarters of 10- to 12-year-olds in the UK are said to have accounts. So what should parents do?
The latest round of worry was sparked by published聽last week聽by Anne Longfield, Children鈥檚 Commissioner for England. The report looked at the social media use of 32 children, who said they used it to stay connected with friends and family and to have fun, by, for example, watching videos. But they also described pressures to be constantly contactable, online comments that undermine their self-esteem, and the perceived need to shape offline activities to make them more shareable.
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鈥淥n Instagram especially, you see your friends going ice skating, partying or talking about how much revision they have done, and it can make me feel inadequate,鈥� says Bea, a 14-year-old from Bristol who did not take part in the study. 鈥淚t鈥檚 just so constant and hard to get away from.鈥�
Children have to take risks on their journeys to adulthood, and desires to fit in and be popular existed before Mark Zuckerberg came along. However, in previous generations these pressures came largely from people they knew, and they mostly stayed outside the home.
鈥淣ow the pressure could come from any one of the nearly 3 billion people online, and follows them from school to home, and can even continue through the night,鈥� says Beeban Kidron, founder of , a campaign group for children鈥檚 rights online.
Early guidance
What parents really want to know is how their children can be protected from harms, given that social media is now integral to the way many young people interact.
A good starting point, , is a basic understanding of childhood development milestones. Broadly, children have a high dependency on carers for security and guidance up to age 5, increased independence and self-care from 6 to 11, and increasing autonomy and growing reliance on peers from 12-18 years. Against this background, we can assess the suitability of social media environments for children of different ages.
Early concerns about internet use by minors focused on sexual grooming and abuse by predatory strangers. Schools pupils are taught about online safety from an early age and Longfield鈥檚 report suggests such messages are hitting home. There is growing evidence that these efforts need to be extended to provide earlier guidance on less extreme but more prevalent risks, including oversharing, low self-esteem, addiction and insomnia.
Longfield says this is needed before children reach secondary school. The evidence suggests she is right, however, approaches that focus solely on the potential negatives without discussing the benefits are unlikely to work.
鈥淢y school has tried to do a lot, but it often involves trying to drill into us how bad social media can be,鈥� adds Bea. 鈥淧eople my age really like social media, so I think a better approach would be if they said 鈥楢lthough it is good, here are some negatives鈥�.鈥�
