Children are becoming more and more prominent on various social media sites. Often by bending the rules. 

This can be a hugely dangerous condition because they can become vulnerable to assaults from adult predators.

Thus comes the question of teaching our children the right value and also know how to keep our children safe on the internet.

Supervision

The dangers are too many for letting children access social media sites without supervision.

Moral Values

By allowing our children to break a rule by lying, we are offering wrong moral signals and bad role model to our children, who may take our acquiesce as a signal for them to do what they feel like while on these social media pages.

Vulnerability to Hackers

Every social media page is vulnerable to hackers and malwares.

So every child must be exceptionally careful before sharing personal information over such websites.

Teach your children to be very careful about sharing their personal experiences, password etc.

Every time the social media websites upgrade their features, they lower their users’ security settings in order to allow their sponsors to have as much user-information as possible.

Even for the savviest of the users of such media, it’s a constant one-upmanship between the company and the users to stay safe through increased safety controls.

Susceptibility to Advances from Strangers

‘Friends of friends’ is an extremely deadly weapon for strangers to befriend young children through these networks.

The social media websites are full of fake profiles, and often strangers and predators use fake profiles to befriend people for their own selfish reasons.

Befriending unknown people, even if they are your friends’ friends, is never a good idea.

How to Stay Safe

Parental interventions can help in keeping their children stay safe while using social media websites.

Teach Them the Rules

Every game comes with a set of rules, meant to keep the enthusiasm of the players intact, while cutting off the wrongdoers short, and social media is also no exception.

Parents need to educate themselves regularly about the new features and upgrades of the social media their children frequent.

Keeping your own profile there helps in many ways. As you learn and relearn the new security measures you can take, you can teach your children the same and keep them abreast with the newest of the safety measures.

Monitor their activity

Allow yourself to be part of your children’s friend list and keep an eye on what they are doing, whom they are befriending, and what is being discussed in their circles. A certain amount of discretion and maturity is needed as tweens and teens may not like too much parental control.

Ask Them To Refuse Friendship From Strangers

Sticking to people you know personally in the real world is always a better idea than to befriend strangers.

Children must learn to firmly refuse ‘Friend Request’ from people they do not know or haven’t met earlier, as a principle for using such websites.

Social media is a fascinating concept and very addictive too. But in its very design runs the weakness of the system that everyone should be aware of, including children. We, as parents, are their guides, and it’s we, who must provide them with the true knowledge of such a media, so that they do not fall prey to its vulnerabilities.