Social Media: The Driver's Ed Approach
In Episode 009: Snap, Post, Parent: Navigating Social Media, I mentioned that I was a relatively late adopter of social media compared to my Gen X peers, which led me to miss out on various information and events. Lisa expressed uncertainty about posting vacation pictures, while Vince shared how family members "approve" content before posting. Although Lisa, Vince, and I poked fun and reminisced about belonging to the pre-iPhone and MySpace generations, our daughters are growing up in a world dominated by smartphones and social media. In fact, nearly 95% of teens and 40% of youth aged 8-12 report using social media (Vogels et al., 2022; Rideout et al., 2022). How can we teach our daughters something we didn't experience ourselves? In this blog post, I compare learning social media competence to learning to drive. Read more about this multipronged approach, which begins with learning alongside our daughters and gradually shifts towards less hands-on involvement over time.
Social Media Competence
The brains of pre-teens and teens are hypersensitive to social desirability, which refers to the desire for social acceptance and approval from peers. Around age 10, a switch in the brain activates. They crave approval and attention from friends, placing a high value on social rewards. Our team has discussed in several episodes and blogs how this function is normal and adaptive, as it helps our daughters find friends with similar interests. We want our girls to form solid friendships because, during the early teen years, their friends begin to take on (don't worry, you're not being replaced, just sharing the C-suite) some of the roles we once filled, like being a confidant and collaborating on daily tasks.
As our daughters seek peer approval and greater independence from us, they have a way to engage with peers that offers a quantifiable measure of approval along with a source of information. Simply put, social media is a website or application where users share and receive content and communicate with others. (YouTube, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram are among the most popular today.) Social media blends social communication and mass media, filled with information, misinformation, and disinformation. It can help foster positive connections for our daughters and contribute to the development of healthy social relationships characterized by empathy, emotional intimacy, social support, trust, and cooperation.
Beyond merely absorbing information, you want your daughter to be an informed and skilled "driver," or social media user, leveraging its advantages and gleaning benefits while also using strategies to protect herself against risks. Social media competence encourages prosocial usage and tactics to guard against negative experiences or cybervictimization. A review of 1,093 studies published worldwide from 2010 to 2021 found that core competencies encompass critical thinking (i.e., understanding the implications of sharing personal data), technical skills (i.e., how to create, review, organize, and share content; managing settings across various platforms), and social-emotional skills (i.e., communication skills, self-regulation) (Polanco-Levican & Salvo-Garrido, 2022).
How do we help our daughters develop this competence when the U.S. Surgeon General reported that youth who spend 3 hours or more per day using social media double their risk of mental health problems (Office of the Surgeon General, 2023)? Digging into this advisory further, we see that not all social media is equal, and how youth use social media and the content they are exposed to matters.
Additionally, it's not too late to reassess or adjust some allowances with your daughter to support her social media competence. Give yourself grace if you wish you'd done something differently, and be transparent with her. Our girls are independent thinkers, weighing desires, rewards, and values in both social relationships and the mother-daughter relationship. However you decide to use this information, remember you are your daughter's mother, not her friend. Warm, responsive parenting with consistently enforced boundaries, also called an authoritative parenting style, leads to better outcomes for daughters than other parenting styles (i.e., permissive, neglectful, authoritarian).
Driver's Education: Learning
I remember a couple of long Saturdays, sitting in a squeaky plastic chair with an attached desk in a room that smelled faintly of cigarette smoke, laminate wood-paneled walls, fluorescent lights, and old shag carpet. I thought, "UGH, what is the point? I know all this. Can't I just drive?!" It looked easy, after all. "Insurance deduction," my mom said. "I get an extra discount with the additional defensive driving course." This had no relevance or meaning to me at the time. After my first accident, yes, at 16, I understood when I had to repeat the defensive driving course.
Think of the learning phase like a driver's education class - learning driving rules and signals, road etiquette, and role-playing before getting in the car. Just as your daughter knows what driving looks like from watching you do it, she also understands social media use from watching you. Start by asking what your daughter already knows. Define family rules and limits, how to discern what to share and what to keep private (i.e., the "grandmother rule" of not posting something you wouldn't want your grandmother to see), and a thorough exploration of privacy settings. Don't be surprised if your daughter has created an account unbeknownst to you or tells you about friends with accounts that parents are unaware of. Keep your responses measured; this is an opportunity to develop trust. Don't fret about teaching everything up front; there will be accidents, and education is intended to lessen the impact of those accidents.
If you need help figuring out what family rules may look like, explore the family media plan tool on HealthyChildren.org (American Academy of Pediatrics). What information you teach your daughter also depends on her age. Childnet.com has developmentally appropriate information divided up into sections for youth aged 4 to 11 and then a section for youth ages 11 to 18.
What Car? (Which Apps?)
When considering a vehicle that you will allow your new driver to access, what features are most important? Perhaps availability, safety features, reliability, and sensibility come to mind, as well as why and where the new driver will be going. Remember my mom's comment about defensive driving and insurance? I found it ironic that after I got my license, I had access to an old family vehicle that didn't have shoulder straps on the seat belts! I should ask her how that insurance plan worked out.
Likewise, what app or apps to use depends on your daughter's age and interests and an app's purpose and features. Is she interested in videos, images, music, text content, or messaging? Investigate age ratings and reviews of apps at Common Sense Media and the Parent Guide in the Google Play Store. Do this together so that she is involved in the process and is learning with you how to discern appropriateness and safety for herself.
Learners Permit: Coaching
Sit in the passenger's seat. Begin the driving practice in an empty parking lot with few distractions before taking to the highway, and stay beside her during the learning phase. Learn social media literacy side-by-side on an app together. Talk regularly about your experiences using that common app. What did she find useful and not useful? How did she feel before, during, and afterward? What about the ads she's seeing - is she interested in new products? Help her understand that social media companies earn profits by collecting user data and generating targeted advertising revenue. Experiment with the app: create content, message each other to practice user features, and then navigate technical challenges together.
Here's where real-life cyberbullying and discrimination can be discussed. Can your daughter recognize online hate, racism, disrespect, and exclusionary behavior? Talk about the seriousness of witnessing and engaging in cyberbullying. Create content, message each other to practice user features, and then navigate technical challenges together. Make it a Sunday dinnertime discussion or a Wednesday evening routine, as long as it's ongoing.
While we recommend having her account passwords, the goal is to build trust in her ability to share willingly with you and to receive your non-judgmental guidance. You're also learning in this space, so she can offer insights for you! Parents with strong social media literacy are more likely to identify opportunities and guide their teen's exploration of social media compared to parents with low social media literacy, who tend to use technical or overly restrictive strategies to control their children's social media use (Daneels & Vanwynsberghe, 2017).
Curfews and Passengers: Time Limits, Friends, and Followers
Some states limit the hours that new drivers are allowed on the roads. When teens start to drive, some parents don’t permit their teens to carry passengers, restrict their travel distances, or disallow highway driving until their teen driver accumulates a certain number of miles or time behind the wheel. These restrictions lift with demonstrated driving competence.
Similarly, consider a graduated approach for your daughter's social media use. Experts no longer recommend an exact time limit on screen time but rather a functional balance between purposeful use of technology and important activities such as sleep, time with family and friends, schoolwork, and physical activities. Consider a time limit on a certain app, like 30 minutes playing an online game or scrolling on a social media app. Have regular social media-free days. Phones go into a locker or into a parent's bedroom overnight.
Co-create a plan for who your daughter can connect with through social media. Consider starting with a small group of friends and an organization she's involved in and guide her in expanding her network. It may seem obvious that she should connect with only people she knows; now is a time to talk about fake accounts, trolls, and grooming behaviors. Maybe the platform has features to create groups or limits in their feed to see content from "close friends" only. This portion of the limits and learning will vary greatly based on your daughter and you!
Model Healthy Social Media Use and Keep Talking!
Finally, our daughters observe and learn social media behaviors from us, just as they do with other behaviors. Follow the guidelines you've established for the family, including no phones during mealtimes and designated social media-free days. Discuss the advantages and challenges of taking breaks from social media. Keep the dialogue going! The Center of Excellence on Social Media and Youth Mental Health (American Academy of Pediatrics) offers conversation starters, suggested discussion times, and tips on when to avoid talking about social media.
For more perspectives on navigating the opportunities and challenges of social media with your daughter, listen to Episode 009: Snap, Post, Parent: Navigating Social Media. In this episode, Vince, Lisa, and I talked about our own experiences with social media and raising daughters.
