Raising Teenagers in the Era of Social Media

When I was a teenager, if you wanted to talk to your friends, you had to be face to face or you had to have their numbers memorized so you could call using a landline. My children barely know what a landline is. (The only reason they are familiar with the concept is because their mother is still old school enough to think there may be an emergency in which the landline would be useful. Quite honestly, it’s probably a waste of ten dollars a month.) The “social media” of my generation entailed hanging out at the mall or the movie theater and people watching to get the gossip. Boy, has the world changed.

Social media, and the ease of access thanks to smart phones, has forever changed the way we communicate, interact, react, and share information. As a parent who never had My Space and who got her first cell phone as an adult and didn’t get a smart phone until much later, I find that raising children who have such each of access to people and information is quite daunting.

My husband and I have tried to limit and monitor our children’s access to social media over the years, but quite honestly, they are way smarter than we are when it comes to figuring out the whole social media environment. It’s especially difficult now that the three oldest are teenagers. Several of our friends have recommended using programs and apps, such as Life360 and Bark, to keep track of what our kids are doing and of where they are going, but I feel kind of weird tracking my seventeen-year-old son’s every move. I mean, if my parents had the ability to do that when I was seventeen…well, yikes! There have been times, however, when I have felt the need to delve a little deeper into my children’s online activity, especially when they were first learning to navigate the social media world, but if I am being honest, we were not consistent with our monitoring.

So, as most parents do, I started to doubt myself. I started feeling as if maybe I wasn’t doing enough to monitor my children’s social media activity or maybe I was too trusting when my teenagers would tell me where they were headed on Friday night. I decided to talk with my friends to see how they have handled social media with their own children. What I learned is that, as with most things, everyone has a different opinion. Some are so on top of what their kids are doing that they actually get alerts and reports of their children’s activity. Others said that when their children were in middle school they were very diligent about monitoring what they were doing on and off social media, but as they got older they became more lax in their watching. As we discussed the issue, one thing became evident. We all had different parenting styles, but we all recognized the importance of communicating with our children.

We must talk to our children about the responsibility of use and dangers inherent with social media. We must help them navigate that world, but as they get older, we must allow them to become more independent. We must trust them with social media in the same way we trust them to drive a car without us sitting in the front seat. And we have to keep talking. Ask them what’s going on in their world. Actually listen to what they have to say. Engage with them on a regular basis without the phone instead of just giving up on interacting with them because they always seem to have their eyes glued to the phone screen.

Raising teenagers has never been easy. The social media era seems to have significantly complicated the matter, but not all hope is lost. Keep talking. Keep engaging. Keep providing those kiddos with a safe place to feel loved and accepted. That’s about all we can do, isn’t it?