Parenting Tip

Social Media

Is social media neutral then? Does it all depend on how a person uses it? What’s good about social media? What’s bad about it? What can I do to encourage healthy social media use in my kids?

For basically all of time, parents have taught children how to do things properly—things like building fires, saddling horses, baking bread, plowing fields, or, more recently, making phone calls, answering the door, and driving cars. But over the last few decades, this natural order has been upended, thanks to our immense technological advancements. Now, it’s the children who show parents how to send text messages, post on Facebook, use Snapchat filters, and make TikTok videos. As technology continues to advance rapidly, children adapt and learn while parents struggle to keep up.

If we want to disciple our kids and train them how to use social media well, we need to start by acknowledging what’s good about it. After all, there are reasons why billions of people are on at least one social media platform. So if we only ever demonize it, two things will happen: 1. We’ll alienate them; and 2. We’ll fail to prepare them to thrive in—let alone bring restoration to—today’s world.

Social media is part of our culture for the foreseeable future. It would be easy to decide that it’s either all good or all bad, but it’s simply more complicated than that...Even if you feel like you’re barely keeping up, your kids still need your wisdom and guidance.

This excerpt taken from A Parents Guide to Social Media by axis.org.   Check it out  here.  It's worth the small investment.