Should Parents Monitor Their Children’s Social Media

This is the era of social media, where everyone is obsessed with social media. People of all ages are involved in at least one of the social media sites. Everyone owns at least one social media account, from young children, teenagers to old age people. 

In comparison to adults, teens and young adults spend most of their time on social media. Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok are the most used social media sites among American Teenagers.

According to research, American teenagers spend around 9 hours daily on social media, which excludes time they spend on digital devices for studies.

Due to the excessive use of social media, many parents are worried about their children’s screen time. Since many crimes occur on social media sites, most parents are concerned about their children’s safety. Parents are concerned whether they should monitor their children’s social media as social media has been a platform for people to commit crimes.

Many teenagers and young children are not aware of the crime on social media. In the hope of gaining popularity, teenagers share all their private information on social media.

This is the reason why most parents these days are into monitoring their children’s social media activities. Some parents believe it is crucial to monitor their children’s social media activities. At the same time, others believe that it is not good to monitor their children’s social media usage.

It is crucial for parents to monitor their children’s social media. And here are some reasons why it is vital to monitor your children’s social media usage.

Reasons for Parents to Monitor their Children’s Social Media

• Cyberbullying

One of the common problems that you can see among teenagers of this digital age is cyberbullying. With the increase in the use of the internet, children are bullying each other through social media platforms. It can be safe to say that physical bullying has been shifted to online bullying. 

Many children facing cyberbullying are reluctant to share their problems with their parents. Facing cyberbullying and not solving the problem will make teens emotionally weak. 

Hence, you need to monitor your children’s social media regularly, ensuring that they are not facing any cyberbullying problems. And even if they are being bullied, you can take action before they are affected severely.

Apart from that, if your children are bullying others, you can know through their social media activity. You can teach your children about the negative aspects of cyberbullying and how bullying will affect people being bullied.

• Online Predators

Many online predators on social media are trying to steal people’s information. Online predators primarily target young children and teenagers who are unaware of fake accounts. They usually make fake accounts, try to be friends with young children, and steal their personal information.

You should monitor your children’s social media account to identify who your children are talking to. To prevent your children from online predators, you should make their social media account private. 

Keep checking your children’s’ friends list on their social media, and if you find any susceptible account, revoke such an account from their friends list. By monitoring your children’ social media accounts, you will know if they are sharing their personal information with random strangers or not.

Besides, you should teach your children about the increase in online predators and things they can do. Make your children aware of the importance of making social media accounts private.

• Sexting

Sexting is a common problem seen among teenagers and has been a significant concern among parents. You can see many teenagers sharing nude pictures of themselves or forwarding inappropriate pictures of others, thinking it’s fun. 

If they constantly get involved in such activities, it can harm them mentally and face some legal consequences.

Thereby, by monitoring your children’ social media accounts, you will know if your children are involved in sexting or not. You can monitor if your children send inappropriate pictures to their peers or random strangers.

By tracking the social media activities of your children, you can keep them on the right track. You will know who is sending inappropriate pictures to your children’s social media account and block them right away.

Also, when your children know you are monitoring their social media, they will stop such behavior. They will feel ashamed to do such activities when they know they are being monitored. 

• Virus and Malware

You can find random links offering many offers and giveaways on social media. Some of the links might be genuine, while others can be fake, and they are primarily for spreading viruses and malware to your children’s devices. 

Children always find giveaways fascinating. They try to participate in all the giveaways without researching if the giveaways are real or fake. Sometimes they may click on the fake links and end up downloading viruses to their devices.

Because of this, monitoring their social media site is essential. By monitoring, you will find if they participate in real or fake giveaways. Likewise, you can view apps they have to download as genuine or fake.

Moreover, you need to communicate with your children about viruses and malware that they can accidentally download from social media. Teach them about the harmful effects of viruses and malware on their device. 

• Limiting Screen Time

The most common reason for parents to monitor their children’s social media usage is to limit their screen time. As mentioned earlier, teenagers’ screen time is an average of 9 hours, and they mostly use this time to surf social media like Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, and so on. 

By monitoring your children’ social media, you will get an idea of how much time your children spend on each social media site. You can even set a time limit using monitoring apps, and many monitoring apps even disable the social media sites after using them for the specified time.

Excessive screen time can be harmful to children’s physical and mental development. You can see many parents use digital devices to keep their children calm. By doing this, children lack the skill of calming themselves. 

Likewise, now children prefer virtual communication instead of face-to-face communication. Children lack communication skills but spend too much time on social media. Thus, limiting screen time can be helpful for a child’s overall development. 

• Monitor Children’s Online Activities

You never know what your children are doing on their social media. You might be constantly worried about what they might be up to, even when you are working. In the worst scenario, you might not be able to focus on your work. Therefore, to reduce this tension, it is necessary to monitor social media.

By monitoring their social media activities, you can control your children or bring them back on the right track even if they are involved in inappropriate activities.

Children might not know that once they post anything on the internet, it will remain on their forever. Even if they delete within a few seconds, the post will stay on the internet database forever. Therefore it is essential to know what your children post on their social media. 

• Identify Friend Circle of Your Children

The following important reason for monitoring your children’s social media is to know their friend’s circle. You need to make sure that your child takes permission to make online friends. 

Even though your children’ friends act innocent in front of you, they might not have good intentions. Or, if you feel susceptible to your children’s friends, then you can find their real intention through their social media activities. 

Children might not feel that their friends are wrong, even when you warn them about their friends. You can know when your children’ friends are pressuring them to take drugs, shoplift or do any inappropriate activities. 

Monitoring social media will keep your children disciplined and minimize the chances of doing any wrong activities. It will help you to keep your child safe from online friendship addiction.

Apps for Parents to Monitor Their Children’s Social Media

Here are some of the best monitoring apps that you can use to monitor your children’s social media activities. 

1. Fenced.ai

Fenced.ai is a complete solution for monitoring your children’s devices’ activities remotely. With the app, you can monitor your children’ social media activities. It will provide you a complete picture of your children’s social media activities like posts they made, messages they sent and received, their friend lists, and many more. 

With fenced.ai, you can monitor social media like Instagram, Facebook, Viber, Skype, Snapchat, etc. Apart from social media monitoring, the app also provides features like:

• Call and message tracking tracks all the incoming and outgoing calls and messages.
• Location tracking shows you your children’ location in real-time.
• Monitor contacts saved in the device.
• Keyloggers track keywords typed on their device.
• Media monitoring shows photos and videos saved on your children’s device.

2. Qustodio

Another parental control app that will help you monitor your children’s social media is Qustodio. Qustodio helps you to supervise and manage your children’s digital devices. You can see your children’s social media activities in a single dashboard. It is one of the best apps to keep your children away from cyberbullying and online predators.

One drawback of this app is that children can use VPN to bypass blocked websites using Qustodio. Besides that, here are some of the features of Qustodio:

• Balance screen time
• Monitor YouTube activities
• Provides social media activities
• Block porn sites
• Provides detailed reports.

3. Bark

Bark helps to keep your children safe from online predators. The app monitors your children’s device activities and sends you an alert if it finds any susceptible activities, and it sends your alerts via text message or email.

Bark tracks all the conversations your children have in their social media accounts. The app also tracks content that children share on their social media. Likewise, here are some more features that bark provides:

• Provides email and text monitoring features
• Detects online predators, cyberbullies, sexting, and more
• Send you an alert when any suspicious activities are going on
• Filters inappropriate content from your children’s device
• Detect the screen time of your children.

4. OurPact

OurPact helps to limit children’s screen time. It is a cross-platform website that is compatible with both iOS and Android. The app allows you to block inappropriate websites. It limits your children’s screen time and helps to provide healthy screen time. 

Here are some of the amazing features that OurPact:

• The block app feature blocks social media and gaming apps. 
• Schedule screen time with schedule screen time feature
• The web filter feature filters all the inappropriate websites.
• Provides geofencing.
• Take random screenshots of your children’s devices’ activities.

5. Screen Time

Screen Time helps to ensure children’s safety in this internet age. It gives you details of what your children are up to on the internet. You can get details of the total time your children’s full time on each app. It also shows your children’s web history.

Here are some features of Screen Time are:

• The instant pause feature pauses your children’s devices.
• Approve apps children download on their device using the ‘approve app’ feature.
• The geofencing sends you a notification if your children’s cross goes to a restricted location.
• View your children’s location using the location tracking feature.
• The schedule feature schedules device usage time.

Conclusion

You may feel guilty going through your children’s social media, but still, it is essential for parents to monitor their children’s social media activities to be sure they are safe. You can keep your children digitally safe and know what they are up to by monitoring their social media accounts.

It is necessary to discipline your children if they will go on the wrong path. Thus, if you’re questioning yourself on whether you should monitor children’s social media, then this article can clear your doubts.

Also Read: The Best Parental Control Software for Your Phone

Also Read: How To Keep Your Kid Safe From Scam