Is Facebook safe for kids?

Facebook is growing so rapidly that even school children nowadays are creating their own accounts without their parents’ supervision.

So comes the question of the moment, is Facebook safe for kids?

Definitely not, but it can be with parent supervision.

We put our children at risk

It is not wrong for anyone of any age to create a Facebook account.

However we live in dangerous times today where kidnappers run rampant and the police have no idea how to catch them (God help us all if they managed to bribe our dear police force).

When kids use Facebook, they do NOT know what details should they fill and what should they not.

I remember advising my 7 year-old niece not to add specific details such as location in her Facebook account.

She asked me back “Why? Should I lie?”

The fact of the matter is, children live in a World where they believe is innocent and as adults we cannot just break it to them and tell them that our society is corrupt and full of bad people who are willing to take advantage of our weaknesses.

According to research (My psychology lecturer), the reason we need to keep the child’s innocence at least until they are a few years older is because if they know how corrupt they are, they will grow up in fear which will change their perspective.

How we can keep our kids safe on Facebook

Some parents would just block access to their kids’ access to Facebook but not everyone is like that because for some other parents, they want their kids to grow with technological understanding.

Here’s how you can supervise your kids:

1)  Control privacy

Since they are young, you can tell them what to and what not to do because that’s the role of a parent.

According to a study made, 14% of Facebook users do not put any forms of privacy settings at all meaning that their account is made public for everyone to see.

As a watchful and concerned parent, you need to play with your child’s privacy setting and control what is it that should be made public and what shouldn’t like your exact home address for example.

2)  Add him as a friend

Sounds like a simple task but once your child gets of age, you’ll get the biggest surprise of your life when they learn to be rebellious.

The teenage years are the only years of your life where you can discover yourself and be as wild as you can before going to the world of employment.

So when teens know that their parents are adding them, I can totally bet my Granma’s fake teeth that you child wouldn’t want to accept you because to be honest, even I was having a hard time figuring out on whether I should accept my parents’ friend requests or not.

But when you do so at a young age, you won’t have to go through that trouble and plus, your child will behave more in Facebook knowing that their parents have a presence there.

3)  Monitor him from your account

Whether your child accepts your friend request or not, you can still monitor him if his account is made public.

Don’t be a crazy stalker parent who comments on each and every post that you child makes.

Although it shows how concerned you are as a parent, always remember that your child won’t understand that.

He will think that you’re annoying if you keep replying to his posts.

The best way to monitor him is to only watch but not reply because that way, he will surely forget that he added you or maybe he thinks that you are inactive which means that he has the flexibility to show his true colours in Facebook.

 

Conclusion

Facebook is actually pretty safe if you’ve edited your privacy settings correctly because that seems to be the only way people can take advantage of you.

They cannot do so through hacking because the Facebook team has a great security system to prevent hackers which means that in order for you to know how safe you are, depends on how much information on yourself that you want to show to the World.

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