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Thursday 4 January 2018

“Please like my post......” Should it really be down to schools to manage the use of social media by eight year olds?

Today the children’s commissioner has called for schools to take more of an active part in helping children to manage expectations on social media as they make the transition from primary to secondary school.  Anne Longfield said that she was concerned about the impact of social media on eight to twelve year olds and that they were too dependent on comments and likes, and that schools should assist in managing their expectations as they transition from primary to secondary school when social media starts to play a more important role in their lives.  


I don’t disagree that schools need to be more aware of children’s social media use, and indeed, many schools do have their own social media policies although many of them focus on the need to not bring the school into disrepute etc.  However, I also think that other adults in children’s lives have a part to play here in both managing the expectations of children as well as their own.  


It could be argued that for those of us with secondary-aged children many of us have entered the social media era at the same time as our children have, and as such many parents’ levels of both use and interaction on social media is not dissimilar to that of their children.  And for many adults, likes, comments and interactions can be seen as equally important albeit on a potentially different level.  


Also, a lack of either understanding or awareness of the potential impact of our own social media use is bound to have an impact on our children as, if we as adults are not managing social media effectively how can we possibly think that we can manage the use of our children’s social media accounts, especially on platforms which we as adults may not even have use or an understanding of.  


It is human nature to react positively to the approval of others.  As such numbers of followers, likes and comments is most definitely something that likely impacts on us all at some point.  When I publish this blog I will of course hope that people will read it, digest it and view it positively.  But for a twelve year old or worse, an eight year old, the ability to process lack of likes and comments or even negative comments is something which they don’t yet have the maturity to do, and if they don’t have an authority figure to tel them that it’s ok if they don’t get likes on their latest post or their snap or instagram picture hasn’t been liked or shared then that can make them feel less valued as individuals even though that picture is just one in millions out there.  


Additionally, social media affords us the opportunity to be seen by and to interact with people we otherwise wouldn’t, people who are strangers out there in the real world, and for whom distance would mean we would otherwise never have encountered them, but who are right there as names and pictures in our social media world, and although it can be said that many parents do keep a tight reign on their children’s social media accounts and only allow them to have friends who they know in the real world, it is certainly also true that for some children they are given unlimited access to a world they do not yet have the maturity to understand or to deal with on many levels.  And if the interaction they get from those strangers is negative they may find it difficult not to take it personally. 


When I blogged about Laura Plummer, the British woman who had been jailed in Egypt for bringing banned drugs into the country, I received a tweet from a complete stranger telling me what a horrible person I was and how they wished something awful would happen to me one day.  I laughed it off because firstly, I have no idea who the individual even was, and secondly, if you put yourself out there in the public world then the reality is that not everyone is going to agree with what you have to say.  But if the comments from strangers were numerous or indeed if negative comments from people who I know in person started mounting up then I may start to wonder about how I was being perceived out there in the social media world.  But for me I could potentially step away from the blog, from twitter etc, but for a preteen for whom social media is also becoming a huge part of their actual social life it’s not so easy to step away because it can feel like stepping away from your actual social life.  


And there is another side to all this.  Rightly or wrongly, there are people, adults even, who view the interaction of their friends on social media as far more of a part of real life than it should be.  I was reminded of this fact around a year ago when a friend of some 25 years or so posted what I would only describe as a modern-day chain letter on his social media account with the adage that only his real friends would respond.  The post begins with the words “today I’m gonna say bye bye to some of you,” and then goes on to state that if you’ve ever had anyone in your life who had cancer or mental health issues (the post can be adapted accordingly,) you will copy and past this to your status in recognission of what people go through.  It then goes on to state that only 5% of their friends will copy and past it because only they are true friends.  Truth is that the reason only 5% copy and paste is because it’s a chain letter designed to clutter one’s timeline.  However in this particular instance the friend in question took the post literally and removed anyone who hadn’t copied and pasted the status from his friend list.  So that’s a a 25 year friendship obliterated over a piece of spam.  


I’m afraid I laughed because in my view it said far more about him than about me. Had he been a much closer friend I might have had words about it in person, but in this instance I thought that he clearly wasn’t worth even being told how stupid he had made himself look.  However imagine being a primary aged child being subjected to rejection because you didn’t follow a protocol you never actually signed up to in the first place.  If adults take it this seriously, how can we expect children to cope with the rejection when it happens?  


In conclusion, children’s expectations on social media need to be managed far more closely, and in my personal opinion that should start with not allowing primary aged children on social media to start with, and then managing their use once they reach the age where they can have facebook, twitter etc without having to lie about their age to get there.  


Social media can be an immensely positive thing.  But that needs to be weighed against the need for acceptance, validation and the recognission of the fact that lack of either does not have any bearing on people as individuals and the people they are.  

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