Social Media Kinda Sucks

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Our parents could pretty safely stay ignorant of the technological advances of our day.

(By our parents and our day, I am referring to those of us who were the teens of the 90s. Back when the internet was pretty much all text and used primarily by nerds. Not a hotbed for sexual predators and teenagers who don’t realize that the nude photo they just posted didn’t really disappear after it faded from the screen.)

As parents of 2010s preteens and teens we do not have the luxury of being ignorant. We need to know what’s going on in our kids’ online worlds. We can’t play dumb. We can’t ignore it. We need to know what’s out there. We need to have full access to their phones and devices.

Oh my goodness, there’s such awful stuff going on out there in the virtual world that I am having a hard time wrapping my head around it.  It’s quite possible our kids won’t even be looking for it when they are exposed. It will just show up in their lives via some stupid app on their phone.  And things seen and heard and read cannot be unseen or unheard or unread.

Though my kids have barely dabbled in social media, I am scared for them. I don’t have a step-by-step plan, but I do have a step one, and that is to LEARN. EVERYTHING. I. CAN.

The following are links to some of the articles I’ve been reading over the past few days. If you have a kid with a smart phone and you are not familiar with the popular apps of the day, I encourage you to peruse the links I have listed below.

And if I figure out something other than Jesus’ second coming that would completely protect our kids from all the evils of the internet, I’ll let you know.

Please feel free to share any advice you think might be helpful to me in my quest to protect my kids.

By KimHarms

Kim Harms is an author, speaker, and part-time library assistant with two decades of freelance writing experience. She has a degree in English from Iowa State University. She and her husband Corey have three super-awesome sons and one crazy dog. A two-time breast cancer survivor, her first book, Life Reconstructed: Navigating the World of Mastectomies and Breast Reconstruction (Familius), is a guide for women walking the breast cancer road. She is currently working on her second book, a devotional for women going through breast cancer.

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