Q: My son is entering seventh grade this coming year. There have been occasional requests from him about gaining access to social media ever since he and his friends got smartphones. This summer, it’s all he talks about. According to him, he’s the last person in his class who doesn’t have any social media accounts. He says wants and needs to stay connected to all of his classmates and know what they’re posting during the summer. He argues that it won’t affect his studies, since school is out, and it is important he doesn’t feel like a social outcast in the fall. That’s all well and good, but I’m worried about giving my son unfettered access to the internet. I read so much about misinformation, hate speech, and cyberbullying online, I don’t know if he’s ready to be exposed to all of those things at once. We feel social pressure to give him access to what his friends have. We don’t want to be branded as overprotective parents. Is there some way to prepare our child for the effects of discovering social media?
A: You can’t keep him off social media forever, eventually he’ll stop asking for your permission and just make an account. I don’t know what exactly is the right age to begin using social media. The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) sets 13 as the minimum age to use social media and the internet in the US. Although experts tend to agree that 13 is the minimum age for adolescents to begin using social media, the Surgeon General says that the internet can pose psychological challenges to kids at any age.
Several platforms are beginning to impose voluntary restrictions on underage users through more parental control settings. One of them provides a “Parent’s Guide” with best practices for monitoring your teen’s social media use, and makes all accounts of under 16 users private by default. Of course, a clever or determined young person can bypass all of this. Restrictions on younger users mean nothing if the user lies about their age.
Your fears about misinformation are real. On June 18, 2024, a clip of Bernie Sanders made the rounds online in which he said “Virtually everyone recognizes Israel’s right to defend itself from terrorism…but it does not have to go to war against the Palestinian people.” Left-wing commentators took that clip, cut out the second part, and declared Bernie a war criminal. Right-wing accounts did the opposite, they took only the second half and called him a terrorist sympathizer. This misquoting is a good example of a common tactic used on the internet. Without prior knowledge, there would be no way to know Sanders had been taken out of context. We encounter so much information on social media that it is impossible to fact check everything we come across.
If you have not discussed antisemitism or the war with your child, you can be sure that his friends are sharing what they have learned from their social media feeds. Your son will be exposed to more opportunities to learn about the world than ever before, whether he gets social media or not. It is imperative that you, no matter how uncomfortable the conversation, share your view on current events and educate yourselves as well as him about other opinions
There is a wealth of resources online to help you have conversations with your child. The Jewish Education Project provides a series of best practices for engaging with younger generations on Jewish issues. The New York Times has compiled a repository of articles, essays, and podcasts to help educate teens on the Israel-Hamas war. You should interface with these materials yourself; no doubt you will find some ideas you agree with and some you disagree with, which gives you an opportunity to discuss media literacy and nuance with your child.
Ideally, you would have the time, energy, and knowledge to educate your child about every problem he encounters on the internet. Realistically, there will be political movements you don’t understand, subcultures you don’t know about, and moral dilemmas that you are not prepared to answer. The best you can do is equip your child to develop his own critical thinking when he encounters new information. You have been through this process before. You taught your child to cross the street, or walk to the store, and then, with heart in your mouth, let him do it alone. This is the nature of parenting. At some point, the grown-ups pull back and grant our children responsibility. We can only hope that we’ve taught them to approach the challenges they’ll face in a healthy way.
There are many ways your child can find the skills needed to be an informed social media user. From his Jewish learning, he will encounters values expressed in the Talmud like respectful disagreement (makhloket), asking questions, and avoiding gossip (lashon hara). From Jewish history, he will learn that life does not always go smoothly, and how to recognize the warning signs of antisemitism. From discussions around the dinner table, he will learn that most problems have more than one valid solution, and that simple, black-and-white answers tend to be weaker than ones with nuance.
Like you, I am also learning about the virtual world. One of the methods I am using is asking other people. You or your son can talk to younger parents, experts, or family members who grew up with social media. Right now, you can ask your son to show you some of the things he’s looking at, but eventually he will want privacy. This will make having conversations with him more difficult. I encourage you not to distance yourself completely from his digital life once he becomes resistant. It won’t be all sunshine and rainbows, and, even if it gives you some stress, I think it’s better that he grows up with you as an engaged party in his world. Of course, since parenting is an art and not a science. Finding the right balance between interference and sharing is always challenging.