It’s natural to believe that youngsters shouldn’t use social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter in our social media-driven culture.

There are several reasons to be concerned, including posture, blue light, poor “real life” social skills, safety, attention span, and other screen time hazards. Our newsfeed is flooded with gruesome accounts of social media mishaps.

It’s only reasonable to want to safeguard children because we have eyes of our own and can see the ways that computer addiction can alter them. Ironically, social media platforms are frequently what helps news stories acquire the attention they do, despite the fact that we wish to protect our kids from this kind of energy and momentum – as well as the associated risks – that exist online.

We use social media to comprehend current events that warn us that social media is terrible for us and even worse for kids. This is how we slip into the trap of labeling social media as “evil” as opposed to carefully considering its usage and results and making necessary adjustments.

Undoubtedly, social media has grown to play a significant role in business marketing. In order to identify the correct demographics, a competent social media marketing business would carefully invest time in researching online user behavior.

Additionally giving marketers a direct route to your child through data, content marketing, social media ads, and other means, maybe a great advantage for your child to learn about new, healthy, and environmentally friendly products and services that educate them and enhance their living standards.

Numerous well-known YouTubers hawking goods without making it plain that is what they are doing.

Cons of social media on children

Let’s start with the negative aspects of children using social media before moving on.

Cons: Self-image, bullying, phony “peer sets,” identity theft, stalking, and a propensity towards the superficial. The ugly truth is that when our kids use social media, they are exposed to a lot.

This is frequently the justification for social networks’ requirement that users create accounts at the age of 13 or older. Some parents decide to lie about their child’s birthdate in order to allow them to use it sooner, which can work under strict supervision as long as strict oversight doesn’t lapse.

Some kids make up their own birth dates without their parent’s knowledge. Naturally, it is assumed that around the age of 13, children are only beginning to be able to digest the information they are exposed to. Parents should base their decision on their unique child’s behaviors, maturity, and experience rather than the child’s birthdate.

Are kids more likely to be in danger online? Yes, in some respects. Peers and adults can now target their victims by setting up anonymous accounts, making bullying simpler. Parents are right to be concerned about the negative aspects of the internet. You may assist safeguard your child from harm by establishing proper boundaries with them, monitoring them closely, and providing consistent check-ins and reinforcement.

Pros of social media on children

Pros: having some familiarity with digital patterns; being exposed to “false news” (this is beneficial if they can tell the difference); If their household is toxic, there may be opportunities for healthy relationships and role models, as well as open ‘networking’ as they get older.

Social media has been around for as long as our children, the so-called “digital natives,” can remember. Children can be more likely to use social media responsibly in the future if they are trained early on how to consume and utilize it in a healthy way.

Successful social media users will be more self-educated than earlier generations and be able to distinguish between fact and bias and straightforward “false news” much more easily. They are more politically active and have greater fervour for social concerns. They’ll be able to recognize an online fraud much more quickly and easily than those of us who haven’t been online as long.

These kids will play a crucial role in transforming the look of social media marketing. While many claims that these youngsters would suffer and be unable to mingle in society, many are doing so because they have been forced to do so throughout their whole digital lives.

Through school, extracurricular activities, and eventually their employment, these online friendships may even develop into in-person friendships. For an introverted child who is able to carefully build their online identity and ways of interacting with others, this can be extremely helpful. Online friendships can do a lot for the ever-changing child who is struggling to make sense of the world with proper supervision and direction.

The hazards and benefits of social media use in pre-teens and adolescents have been studied by the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the evidence is pretty evenly distributed. For more advice on starting a conversation about online safety, look into their resources on talking to your teens about social media and its risks.

There must be limits set when it comes to youngsters and social media. Because they retain those boundaries and underlying assumptions into adulthood, children need that both online and off, giving them a higher chance of using social media in healthy ways.

It’s important for children’s mental health, their ability to form and sustain healthy connections in life, and their ability to see themselves based on and through how they perceive others and how others perceive them to be given tiny responsibilities that increase with time.

Social networking is not “good” or “evil,” but rather an important teaching tool that serves as a continual, practical, and educational parody of the reality in which they live.