4 Tips for Safeguarding Social Media for Kids

If your kid is like most other children these days, chances are they already have social media for kids accounts or they’ve been wanting to make one. While this aspect of life can certainly help a child develop and mature through social interaction, sharing, and exploring the world through the eyes of others, there are also many risks that come with staying active on social networking platforms.

1. Use a Privacy-Oriented Social Media for Kids

There’s no rule that says your child should only be using Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. In fact, those platforms and other major social networking sites have all been criticized and even sued for their lackadaisical and exploitative approaches to managing user privacy. The new breed of social media platforms are much safer for children to use because they don’t broker in user data and expose your children to all sorts of privacy concerns in the process.

2. Install Parental Control Software

Parental control software will make it easier for you to monitor social media for kids networking posts and can help you keep a log of their activity that can be modified, even if they delete their history or take down posts after publishing them. Of course, these tools can also be used to keep your kid from visiting questionable or inappropriate websites. So, they’re good to use as part of an overarching web security plan.

3. Require Shared Passwords

Letting your kid have their own password might seem like a good way to teach them about independence and growing up, but in reality, you’re just giving them the ability to do whatever they want in the social media accounts behind your back. If you don’t know their password, you can’t log into their accounts to see what they’ve been doing – it’s really that simple. To keep that from becoming the case, it’s best to require that your child share their passwords with you in order to continue using social networking sites.

4. Use Location-Tracking Apps

Things can really start to get scary when your child gets old enough to arrange parties and dates through social media. At that point, it’s best to use a location-tracking app to check up on your kid’s whereabouts. After all, you don’t them being lured out into the world somewhere by a stranger or imposter who’s pretending to be one of their friends online, so having this backup measure in place to help you quickly locate your son or daughter is definitely a step worth taking to give yourself peace of mind.

Cybersecurity and Real-World Security Are One in the Same

Nowadays, protecting your child’s online activity means just as much as protecting them when they’re on the way home for school at the store, or in any other real-world scenario. Thus, taking the above steps to make sure your kid isn’t doing anything risky on social media platform is an essential preventative measure that every parent should take.