How to help your children deal with the pressures of social media.

How to help your children deal with the pressures of social media.

Social media is a huge part of people’s lives today.

So huge in fact, that it is almost impossible to imagine a world without it.

Social media is a fantastic way to stay connected with friends and family regularly and to keep up to date with what is going on in the world.

However, social media has negatives also. It can be a high source of pressure and stress. It is reported that younger people that use social media regularly are more likely to suffer from mental health issues such as depression and anxiety.

Parents need to teach their children how to deal with the pressure social media can cause.

Read on to find out how to help.

Introduce social media breaks.

Potentially the most crucial step, limiting the amount of time your children are on social media each day is a terrific way to reduce the pressure of social media.

Most phones today will have a screen time feature to limit available time on certain apps.

This can encourage your children to step away from the pressures of social media and to spend time with their friends face-to-face, or to do an activity away from screens like reading a book or going on a family day out.

Encourage your children to communicate with you more often.

Children may not be able to realise that social media is potentially harming them.

There must be frequent communication with your children to avoid it getting to this point.

Asking your children how they are feeling and talking to them about things both outside and inside of social media can be a release of pressure or anxiety they may be feeling.

This may be an uncomfortable conversation at first so try breaking the ice with your own social media experiences first.

Remind them that no one is perfect.

Often with social media, we only see the highlights of someone’s life. Children do not always realise that social media does not show the difficult parts of life.

Making your children aware of this can relieve any pressure or anxiety of having that perfect life it appears everyone else has on social media and will bring them back to a reality that trying to keep up with everyone on social media is unhealthy and unrealistic.

By teaching your children to be more comfortable with their own lives rather than fall under the pressure of what you ‘should’ be posting to social media.