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Q: "How can I get my 12 year old daughter off social media every moment she's home? It's interfering with schoolwork, family time, & her doing other things. Plus her mood seems all over the place & I'm worried."
A: You are voicing 3 potentially overlapping concerns: excessive social media use, difficulty knowing how to set limits on gadget time, & your daughter's moods.
The Biggest Concern: WHY are limits on excessive social media time so necessary? Interference with homework, activities, & family time is just one, important aspect. What is rarely talked about yet can be hugely concerning (& may be a culprit in your daughter's fluctuating moods) & a significantly under-recognized phenomena - is social media's impact on kids' developing resiliency. Gone are the days when the social pressures of the school day could be eased by the calm & quiet of returning home, a natural break time to distract, reflect, be soothed, learn to self-soothe, & refuel. Instead, social media bombards & burdens our kids unrelentingly with social pressures, inclusion-exclusion fears, dramas, & sometimes cyberbullying. Lacking this respite at home can interfere with kids learning critical coping skills to manage their strong emotions & build their identity. Without respite, their stress mounts, moods run wild, & behavior becomes more dysregulated. Explaining this phenomena to your daughter is key. She will not like the limits & will still resist them, but she is likely to have greater appreciation if she is given a rationale which goes far beyond the mundane parent & child struggle, & is in fact validating of her inner experience. Talking about this together can open the door to further discussions about how she is doing navigating her worries & social world.
The Reality: Social media is pervasive & there are many challenges to limiting its use. We all know that a big, complicating factor is that gadgets are now necessary, not just for normal socializing, but also for homework tasks, reaching out to peers to clarify homework assignments & receiving help, & communicating with teachers. Cellphones are now smartphones, with access to the internet & all kinds of popular sites, some of which blatantly promote social drama, provocation & meanness. Many teens know full well how to bypass parental phone & computer blocks. So what's a parent to do?
Limits: Your daughter truly needs her gadgets, but finding the appropriate places, times, & duration of use are within the parental realm. A pre-teen needs to know that some appropriate parental monitoring will happen. Avoid putting a computer in her bedroom; instead, homework & computer time should occur in the family's public areas where you can help her stay on homework task with built-in breaks. Ideally, a child's first phone comes with the caveat that phones will never be allowed in bedrooms past bedtime. It's key for parents to model moderation & prioritization of family time with rules of no family phone use during mealtimes & establishing additional unplugged times. Expect your daughter's resistance to these limits. Be prepared to discuss her fears about not being plugged in to her peers' every social media interaction. Nonetheless, she will hear your concern & rules very differently if the central, organizing focus is about helping her build resilience in the face of very real & potentially extreme day-to-day pressures.
-PCA at CMO
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