Introduction
Social media, especially networking sites has become an integral part of children’s life and impacts in both positive and negative ways. Considering its excessive inclusion in the daily life of kids, it’s high time to have a look at its harmful effects on the health and well-being of children.
Although social networking apps provide a harmless socializing platform and act as an escape from daily life pressure and stressful routine, but scientific research emphasizes that their excessive use impacts both mental and physical health and threatens child safety. To protect kids, the role of a spy phone app is vital as it provides parents an opportunity to monitor their activities and ensure their safety.
Harmful effects of social media and other networking sites
Mental health
Social media has negative impacts on the mental health of kids as their minds are fragile and they easily fall for ideal lives presented in the online world.
Unhealthy comparisons
Using social media, your kids can be exposed to carefully crafted content, pictures, posts, and videos that might alter their self-image and sense of reality. Such continuous exposure to someone’s perfect life can put your child in unhealthy comparisons, feelings of imperfection, and naive expectations. Children easily fall into this trap that everyone except them is blessed with all the happiness and comforts, which brings depression, anxiety, and insecurity in their lives.
Cyberbullying
Cyberbullying can have a profound impact on your child and being a parent, you must be aware of its different forms including rumors, intimidation, and harassment. Cyberbullies can spread negative information about your kids in their friend circle to humiliate them or they can leave hurtful and embarrassing comments on posts of your child. All these acts can bring mental and emotional problems including depression and anxiety.
Online predators
This is another dangerous effect of social media on kids that threatens child safety and well-being. Online predators often pose as a child to gain the confidence and trust of the victim kid. Once they are successful in gaining the trust of the kid, they can manipulate them to be involved in inappropriate behavior, meet in person, and share confidential information. This results in emotional/physical abuse and other traumatic experiences that impact children for their entire life. It can impact their personality, cause depression, and affect their academic performance.
Social habits
The impact of social media has a great impact on the behavior and attitude of kids. Some of the ways in which it influences their social habits are discussed below. `
Poor academic performance
With the excessive use of social media, the performance and grades of kids drop. Social networking sites are addictive and appealing; therefore, kids easily get attracted to them and spend several hours viewing stories and connecting with people of similar interests. This leads to reduced focus and procrastination which drops their performance in education. On top of that, the notifications sent by social networking apps regarding updates, messages, and friend requests coupled with the curiosity to keep a check also hinder the learning process.
Focus on virtual relationships
Due to extreme dependence on social media, children now prioritize their online friends over their actual relationships which eventually causes a huge distance between parents and kids. The reason behind such impact on relationships is that kids spent the majority of their time online due to which they cannot become part of family discussions, gatherings, and face-to-face interactions. This results in disconnections and creates voids between parents and kids and impacts their communication skills as well.
Poor attention span
Since kids spend excessive time on social media and the constant sharing of notifications and information impacts their attention span. Therefore, it becomes quite challenging for them to focus on a single activity for extended periods of time. This impacts their studies and health as they are constantly involved in scrolling news feeds while studying or even eating.
Key takeaways
Now what can you do? To protect children, you cannot simply deny them from using IT gadgets and social media as these are major sources of learning. Moreover, all children now have access to these devices and if you’ll not allow your kids to access the network, they’ll be in an inferiority complex and isolation thereby impacting their personality and confidence level. Therefore, parents should consider alternative solutions to deal with this problem.
Spy phone apps: the savior
Thorough monitoring of child activities
Don’t worry, what you need to do is start using the spy phone app. You need to monitor all the activities of your child with whom he is in contact, the groups he has joined, any fishy messages that he has received, and any inappropriate videos or pictures in his phone gallery. Parents need to know about the spy phone app, as they can help in gaining access to recorded calls, social media posts, individual messages, group chats, visited web links and watched YouTube videos, and voice notes so that you can take timely actions including reporting cyberbullying, contacting the admins of social media platforms, blocking bullies, or involve law-enforcement authorities depending on the situation to protect the child.
Likewise, by monitoring you can observe unhealthy comparisons, low self-esteem, and disturbing behavior in your child you must intervene. You must appreciate and acknowledge the child for all his strengths and good deeds so he can feel good about himself and avoid unnecessary comparisons.
Blocking apps and friends
With the help of the spy phone app, you can still protect your child from such traumatizing events. It enables parents to be proactive and vigilant by keeping an eye on the social activities of the child. By accessing online conversations, group chats, videos, and voice messages, parents can suspect such an event. These apps also provide an option to block a specific individual who sends a threatening message to your child, or you can block specific apps altogether by blocking features. In addition, these apps also allow parents to filter websites for kids so that all harmful URLs can be added to the blacklist so that kids cannot access disturbing content and do not become exposed to online predators.
The significance of spy phone apps cannot be denied when it comes to containing the harmful effects of social media on kids. There are different options available in the market for spying on kids’ activities on social media. To the best of our knowledge, Mobistealth is one of the amazing choices that parents can make in this regard. It helps you to track the activities of your kid and protect their mental and emotional health.