If you are wary about social media and how it is affecting your teen, you are not alone. Parents often blame social media for issues their teens are facing like poor body image, depression, and negative behavioral trends like devious licks.
When your teen experiences feelings of loneliness or alienation, you might want to blame Snapchat for constantly showing them pictures of their peers hanging out with one another. When your teen feels self-conscious or struggles with maintaining a healthy body image, you may want to blame the Instagram models that are always posting their “perfect,” airbrushed bodies on the platform.
While it’s natural to want to fault these social media platforms, the truth is that social media as a whole is not always to blame. The way your teen interacts with social media may be the main culprit.
For instance, if your teen is following triggering accounts or looking up triggering hashtags, it can lead to significant problems. If your teen is struggling with an eating disorder, looking up TikTok challenges related to eating or following Instagram accounts of celebrities that advertise weight loss pills and supplements will be disastrous for their progress.
Frequent engagement with social media can also be problematic for teens. If your teen is spending hours of the day scrolling through Instagram, it is easier for them to internalize and begin to believe that their body is not as good and their life is not as perfect as those of the friends and celebrities they follow. If they spend hours browsing through TikTok, they may be more likely to participate in a harmful trend because it seems like everyone else is doing it.
Instead of immediately jumping to the conclusion that social media is bad or dangerous because it can influence your teen, consider helping your teen learn how to utilize social media in a skillful way so that they can reap the benefits without engaging with the harms.
Here are a few ways you can help your teen manage their relationship with social media:
Set screen time limits
If your teen has a smartphone, they can set screen time limits. This function allows smartphone users to limit the amount of time that they can spend on a particular app.
When your teen has a set amount of time throughout the day to use different social media platforms it will prevent them from inundating themselves with the latest trends and messages that are shared on these platforms and encourage them to capitalize on the time they do have by looking at the most meaningful and important posts that they want to see each day.
If your teen only has an hour on Instagram, for instance, they will likely spend more time looking at posts and stories from their closest friends than searching potentially problematic hashtags or viewing stories from celebrities that may make posts that are less than ideal for teens.
Limiting screen time also means that your teen will have more time to do other activities that can help them manage their mental and physical health. Instead of spending hours on their phone, they can spend time building relationships with their friends and family, getting exercise, journaling or practicing other calming activities, and making positive memories.
Here is information about screen time limits for Android and iPhone users.
Block trigger words
On platforms like Twitter and Instagram, teens can block specific words, phrases, or hashtags that they don’t want to show up on their feeds.
Help your teen come up with a list of words that they want to block. These should be words that may trigger your teen to feel negatively about themselves or to engage in behaviors or thought patterns that can be harmful for their mental and physical health. For instance, if your teen has engaged in self-harm in the past, they should block words associated with self-harming and the word “self-harm” itself so that they aren’t triggered when they use social media.
When these words are blocked, they can scroll freely without worrying that they will accidentally stumble across content that will influence the progress they are making in therapy.
Here is a guide to muting words on Twitter.
Be intentional
Has your teen ever closed out of TikTok only to absentmindedly open it again a second later?
Instead of scrolling aimlessly through posts on social media, your teen should try and be intentional about how they are going to use social media whenever they open their apps. This means thinking about what they want to look at before they open the app and being mindful of the way the content they are viewing is affecting the way they feel as they scroll.
When your teen is able to utilize social media in a healthier way, you will start to see that social media doesn’t have to be a problem if it is used appropriately.