Kriegler Education

Kriegler Education

Do you know what your children are doing online?

The digital world has moved so fast for parents that many don’t understand how their kids are being influenced or targeted online. They underestimate the disastrous consequences of internet bullying, low self-esteem related to online activity and digital predation on young people.

Young people today appear linked to the internet by a virtual umbilical cord. We are all aware that every modern invention has a good and bad side. So, as wonderful as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other platforms are for social connection, they are equally capable of being used for social manipulation, bullying and predation. Education about the methodology of online predators is crucially important.

Kids love having digital followers. To acquire the following, they might decide to keep their profiles public. This makes them visible to literally anyone in the world including hackers, groomers, criminals and voyeurs. The daughter of a close acquaintance of mine was inveigled into an online ‘romance’ that cost her in excess of $10,000 because she was tricked into funding false cancer treatment for her online catfishing ‘beau’. The settings are available to keep a profile private and kids are better off limiting who can access theirs.

In a report from the Australian Federal Police (AFP) research found that despite ‘just under 17,000 reports of online child sexual exploitation received by the ACCCE in 2019, the Australian-first research found only 21% of parents and carers think there is a likelihood that online child sexual exploitation can happen to their child’ (AFP, 2020). It is reported in the same research study that ‘four out of five children aged four are using the internet; 30% of these children have access to their own device’ and ‘only 51% of the research participants sit with the children while they use the internet’.

The AFP works in partnership with the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Datacom and Microsoft on an initiative called ThinkUKnow  (Think U Know, 2021) which curates excellent resources for parents and educators with strategies to prevent children becoming targets or victims of online predation. The AFP also works with State and Territory Police on this initiative and it is well worth checking the advice on this platform.

Two final comments on the impact of digital platforms are worth mentioning. What young people post online doesn’t ever go away. It is almost impossible to delete or erase things that have left a device. Prospective employers are now using these platforms to check on and assess potential workers. Also, even things sent in confidence to someone trusted can be used against the sender if relationships sour. It is worth advising your children to regard everything they send as capable of ending up being public. Warn them to deeply consider what they post about themselves.

Body Image

In September 2021, a Facebook whistle blower, Frances Haugen’s comments that the company’s own research indicated their platform, particularly Instagram, was having a negative effect on teenagers. The Wall Street Journal printed an article about the deleterious effects of viewing Instagram posts including anxiety, depression and eating disorders like bulimia and anorexia nervosa. Thirty-two percent of teen girls in the study said if they had poor body image, they felt worse about themselves. And young men are not immune with 14% of them also feeling worse after viewing Instagram (Wells, Horowitz, & Seetharaman, 2021).

Instagram’s head of public policy, Karina Newton commented in response saying that said the Wall Street Journal story had ‘focused on a limited set of findings and casts them in a negative light’. I have some sympathy with Newton’s statement, because researching the causality between social media on specific psychological and social outcomes is near impossible. It’s difficult to use the data generated by social media research. A statistic can’t capture the users’ family and social environment or assess their mental states as they engage on these platforms. If we could assess these elements, it would greatly improve the interpretation of the data. But, even if we can’t prove causality, we need to be aware of the issues.

When viewing social media platforms, children and young people are seeing everything from the outside. They cannot know the true circumstances or motives behind the posts. Not the real experiences, but a selection of the best of experiences are posted by celebrities and Instafamous people. Fear of missing out and envy of what kids perceive as others’ amazing normal may impact on their self-worth. And their sense of inferiority is built on false, artificial exteriors.

The negative impact of social platforms may have harmful effects on self-esteem. Low self-esteem is proven to reduce quality-of-life outcomes because it blunts risk-taking, reduces resilience to bounce back from mistakes and causes people to become stuck in negative thinking spirals. Feelings of insignificance, loneliness, withdrawal and listlessness have teens feeling like they are walking through treacle. It can lead kids to make destructive decisions including accepting mistreatment, self-harming, promiscuity or harming others (Solomons, 2013).

It is important this information about damaging effects is in the public arena, but will it help your tweens and teens in the immediate term? Social media has outrun legislation, societal norms and user impact because it has happened so fast. Unlike mainstream journalism, norms and protocols for social media are in their infancy. It is not even certain if the platforms are publishers or not. As publishers, social media giants would be subject to entrenched laws, but their status as publishers is still being debated.

Quite simply parents can’t rely on social media platforms to solve the problem, they have to engage with it themselves. It’s time to transform the situation and create a narrative of using youthful minds and bodies to experience life and achieve unique personal goals and to shift the focus away from ‘appearing’ and start a revolution of ‘doing’.

Parents have the power to influence this narrative from an early age, in fact, from infancy. What they say and how they say it can change how their children think. They can provide the activities that nurture a positive self-esteem. Thinking is the key to counteracting the powerful influences and manipulations emanating from social media.

How can we mitigate against the effects of social media?

As parents what you can do in the immediate term is work with your kids to hone social media literacy. We can help them to form a healthy balanced identity by applying advanced critical thinking. Good thinking can help them to navigate many of the deleterious influences that they will encounter.

360° Thinking

Converse with your family to develop perspectival, thinking. Offer different points of view. If you commence doing this from an early age, and pay attention to their perspectives during conversations, they are likely to see the value in this thinking.

Frame the experience by examining together how the images these days are photoshopped and manipulated to create near impossible ideals of body perfection. And before the photoshopping, kids are only choosing to portray their most enviable selves. The one selfie out of twenty that makes them look good.

Also talk about appearance as the least important part of a full life. Emphasise how the body is the vehicle for achievement in a million other ways.

Embrace directed by Taryn Brumfitt, founder of Body Image Movement, is a well-researched punch packing film that shines a light on the issue. Taryn embarked on her film journey when she posted some reverse order photographs of herself. Her before image was her as a sculpted body builder, and her after image was taken when she had given birth to her baby. The photos caused a tsunami of negative comments. The film is her response, and every young person will learn from it (Brumfitt, 2016).

Presenting an optimistic view and offering realistic praise of their accomplishments can also counteract the effects of social media on their psyche.

Fake news

The same 360° thinking can arm your kids with the ability to filter out fake news. Remarkably, kids these days are more immune to the influence of fake news than we think they are. They are possible more alert than we are.

Develop face-to-face interests

As I write this, we are negotiating the roadmap out of intermittent COVID lockdowns in Victoria that have shaped the last 18 months. So truly there haven’t been many opportunities for face-to-face anything!

But involving kids in team sports, rock climbing, dance, music, drama, writing, cooking, baking or strategy games like chess are all great ways for them to interact with real people in real situations. Having part-time jobs provides them with key skills that will come in handy later in life and look great on their CVs when they start looking for work seriously.

 

Lili-Ann Kriegler (B. A Hons, H. Dip. Ed, M.Ed.) is a Melbourne-based education consultant and author of Edu-Chameleon. Lili-Ann’s primary specialisations are in early childhood education (birth-9 years), leadership and optimising human thinking and cognition.  Her current part-time role is as an education consultant at Independent Schools Victoria and she runs her own consultancy, Kriegler-Education. Find out more at https://kriegler-education.com