Social media is how youth connect nowadays. With a decline in public youth places like in the parks, malls, etc… that are now seen as "dangerous", the Internet and social media provide a seemingly "safer" space for socialization. On the other hand people with conservative opinions, strongly say that no social media is good for kids and they strongly believe it's actually destructive and nothing good comes out of it.  They also pinpoint the addiction it causes kids to their phones.

At the age of13, the youth has specific needs towards a sense of belonging and the absence of social media can cause many problems for them socially, unless they themselves decide not to use it. But for kids below the age of 13, whether or not a child should have social media is ultimately up to the parent's choice. But in today's time, we cannot think it is a very realistic mindset since one way or another, kids can have access to create social media accounts. The real question is whether or not a parent should monitor a child's usage and check on their activities on these online platforms.

Parents have every right and should monitor a child's social media usage, especially since they are the ones providing the mobile device. By monitoring, the parents should have access to see what they post and not their actual accounts. But this method seems to have many loopholes including different privacy settings that the child can set so the parents cannot see specific posts.

Many older people complain that there is something wrong when they see teens and kids nowadays walking down the street only paying attention to their mobiles and not their friends and families. Even around a restaurant table, during an outing, they are only staring at their mobile screens and not looking at each other in the eyes, nor talking. Due to this addiction to social media, kids are unfortunately increasing the emotional distancing among their friends and families.

Apart from the addiction and emotional distancing caused due to the uncontrollable use of social media by kids, there is also a high chance for kids to get into certain online threats like secret games with secret tasks. In recent years many such online games have even risked the lives of many teens and kids around the globe.  Asking kids to stop using any social media platform or app wouldn’t be the ideal way to stop them from getting exposed to such online threats. After all, from one way or the other, they may try to find any other app and will start to use it.

The best way would be to monitor kid’s activity, in order to make sure they are safe and not doing anything that can bring them harm or cause harm through the social media platforms. If you have kids, you should do your best to make them understand what is technology and how damaging it can be and also teach them its benefits.