Social Media – Relationships & Individual Development

Social Media Impact on Relationships

Too much social media use can stifle relationships at any age if there is not enough balance exercised in order to maintain meaningful face to face interaction. While social media can also encourage face to face interaction, most relationships are more satisfactory in person (in particular romantic and dating relationships).

As long as there is open communication and selectivity in content, social media does not have to be damaging. Otherwise, social media has been seen to lead to decreases in family cohesion and a sense of loss of parental control.

 

 

Here are tools parents can use if they feel they need to safeguard their child’s devices. 

 

However, strict monitoring and rules such as these can push children and teens into withdrawal and make them feel they are not trusted. Foster a habit of open discussion with your child before they get too far into their individual use of technology and continue to openly mediate their content side by side, explicitly teaching them internet safety and common sense until you are sure they can wisely navigate the internet and social media on their own.

This is especially important because teens can be very susceptible to social media messages and peer pressure. Social media content often depicts perfected and cured images of everything from lifestyles to body types and promote the narrative that only those who align with the trendy and popular images are worthy individuals. Too much social media use is correlated with more depressive symptoms, short-term declines in subjective well-being, body dissatisfaction, and internalization of negative media messages.

Common Sense Media has internet safety courses for all ages K-12 which cover these issues! Proper education, open conversation, and loving parental presence can lead to children’s healthy social media usage.

 

Assistive Technology

Before we get started, check out this quick video on what Assistive Technology is!

Recent advances in assistive technologies are utilizing robots and virtual reality in order to foster the development of life skills, social skills, emotional skills, self-regulation, and overall improved functional capabilities.

 

For example, this robot is used to model emotions for children who may difficulty recognizing and appropriately reflecting them. This will help to foster social skills.

 

Additionally, understanding of differently-abled individuals or those who experience the world differently from typically-developing individuals. Check out some of these technologies by clicking on the blue links!

 

 

Educational Technology

EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY CAN HAVE GREAT OUTCOMES FOR CHILDREN

As educators move towards more creative integration of technology in the classroom, they are realizing that it can help children perform better academically and become the innovators that the world needs!

Educational technology can support autonomy by providing children with choice, it can enhance competency and mastery by providing immediate and direct feedback, and it’s engaging which means children want to return to the format and keep working towards their goals. Eventually, this leads to a shift from external motivation to intrinsic motivation for learning.

Children and studies alike have cited wanting to interact with educational technology because it provides the following:

How are your child’s teachers using educational technology?

Video Games & Virtual Worlds

Parents 2-Point Guide to Choosing Video Games

1. AVOID VIOLENCE

Increased aggression and more desensitized behaviors have been associated with violent video games.

2. Choose Something Stimulating

Don’t confuse exciting games with fast movements and pretty lights for stimulating games. Does the game require active thinking and mental flexibility? Then it is worthwhile to let your child spend some time playing it. As long as the game doesn’t allow your child to go unthinkingly for an extensive period of time. This can later cause difficulties in your child’s proactive attentional control.

What about Virtual Worlds

Virtual Worlds are ones in which your child can create an avatar and interaction with other real people.

Children’s interactions with these platforms need to be monitored as they can be used by predators to lure children into unsafe situations and are generally very uncensored. There also aren’t very many that have much educational benefit to your child. However, if you look closely, you can find some virtual worlds that are safe, allow your child to explore personal interests and provide a creative outlet, and even teach valuable life skills such as virtual worlds based on social emotional learning.

CHECK OUT THE PROS & CONS OF VIRTUAL WORLDS PLUS TIPS FROM COMMON SENSE MEDIA

 

 

Television & Movies: Background Bombs

Parents, I know what you’re thinking! It’s Friday night, you’ve just had a long day of work, and you still need to tie together some loose ends! Your child still has a lot of energy but you just can’t play right now. So, you just turn on the television to the first children’s show you find right?

WRONG! Just kidding

Just kidding, but seriously, you should consider what shows you let your child watch.

If your child is two years or younger, they really don’t learn much at all from watching television – it has little to no educational benefit! Consider scheduling a quick play date or babysitter so they can have valuable face to face interactions with someone else while you are busy. These will actually foster their healthy development in those busy moments.

For younger children over the age of two, choose child-friendly shows or films that feature lots of engaging facts and information, as children from about ages seven to ten really take in the information they encounter while watching television and movies. You can also look for shows that feature meaningful encounters that exhibit prosocial development and positive interactions (even when there is a moral lesson contrasting negative behavior in a script, children fixate on the negative behaviors that are depicted more strongly). Children roughly ages 11-14 internalize lessons regarding social emotional learning from television.

Let’s fast forward to Saturday Morning. You and your child are cleaning the house and completing small household tasks. It’s really quiet in the house so you flip on the TV for some background noise. No one is really watching anyway, so no harm done, right?

Weelllll….

Background television is actually very impactful to younger children’s development. Why?

1. Attention

When you think they are not attending to it, they are! This is especially true if you are attending to it. And you probably are because TV is distracting. Slightly older children follow the gaze of their parents and caregivers, so when your attention gets caught on television, so does theirs.

2. Adult Choice TV

When TV time is not purposefully directed at children, parents tend to take advantage and put on a show that interests themselves. Often, this is not a show appropriate for children, thus it exposes the child to adult content and can leave misconceptions they form from information they take in unchecked. This is because while you are distracted from the task you were trying to complete because of the TV, you are also distracted from time with your child. Parents engage less with children in general when background TV is on and the interactions that do take place are less attentive. Because this leads to a lack of parent-child interactions that aid development, some children (in particular infants highly exposed to adult viewing content) can later experience decreased executive functioning and poorer cognitive outcomes.

 

Check out this infographic for a quick summary of how television/content viewing can affect children!

 

Choose your TV times and content wisely. It matters!

Tech Toys: Worthy of the Buy?

So what exactly are tech toys? And how will they help or hinder your child’s development? Tech

Tech Toys are exactly what they sound like: toys that have partial or full technological components? Game boys, cars that toddlers can drive, electronic puppies and the like. However recently, the trend has the most popular children’s tech toy aisles stocked with virtual reality technologies, drones of a types, shapes, and sizes, and toys that your child can code themselves.

But does playing with these toys do anything beneficial for your child?

Here’s what to look out for:

 

1. Open-Ended Tech Toys

This means the toys you choose are not based on a single story line (a particular movie or cartoon your child likes, for example). This influences children to simulate the exact story line they learned while viewing the movie or cartoon rather than to develop their own scripts. This limits their own creativity and mental flexibility as well as lessens opportunities they have to explore and work through their own challenges, curiosities, and thoughts through play. Opportunities to do just this is what makes play so value for children’s healthy development.

2. Tech Toys with Immediate Feedback and Reference

So you really want your child to have 21st Century Skills and have early exposure to coding? Before you buy that caterpillar you might want to make sure that your child’s work and thought process is stored in a way that makes each step they took to code an action available to them. This way, when something goes awry in their design they can actually solution-seek rather than use guess-work to get their desired outcome. This will allow them to purposefully redesign, learn from their mistakes, and not be afraid to make more mistakes in the future – a critical skill that will assist them in becoming the great innovator you dream they will one day be.

3. The Power of the Parent

Don’t ever forget how important your presence is as a parent. You might see your child perfectly content to play with their device alone, but your child learns a lot more when you are there to explore with them and interpret any information that may be confusing. This doesn’t mean you should explore for your child, simply that you remain attentive. Even if you don’t directly teach your child something while engaging with a tech toy, remaining present and attentive fosters positive parent-child interactions which hold influence in other spheres of children’s lives. Children with positive and secure parental attachment reap benefits both academically and socially. Every interaction matters.

Check out these worthwhile tech toys and begin with them if you’re looking for a starting place:

 

This awesome tech toy allows children to get creative and build whatever they want including a function of their choice with electronic building blocks. While there are 16 close-ended designs, once your child figures out what functions are available they can go on to create their own new inventions. Check out the website for more details: https://shop.littlebits.cc/products/gizmos-and-gadgets-kit-2nd-edition 

This Tech Toy allows for the integration of hands-on play and technology as well as for interactive play with others and coding your child can see! Check out the website here: https://www.playosmo.com/en/

 

Dash and Dot Coding Robots also provide trackable, visible coding! Check them out here: http://bit.ly/2rgofMM