As a now 20-something year old who grew up in the 2010s, I was a tween myself when social media was born. I remember when social media was simply a platform to post a photo of your cat and poke your friends on Facebook, but now, we are a generation that is chronically online. Gone are the days of using social media to escape the real world- now we use the real world to escape social media!
Back in the day, us tweens didn’t know the implications of sharing our lives online and leaving behind large digital footprints- this was a new world for us and everyone was starting out in it together- it was the lost, leading the lost. However, I have lived and learned that maybe all those YouTube Videos that I uploaded when I was 11 (that I thought were super cool) might come back around to embarrass me 10 years later. Who knew that what you post online, stays online?! (Not us!)
However, embarrassment is the least of our concerns when it comes to online safety (although the thought of those YouTube videos resurfacing makes me shudder). There’s a big and scary World Wide Web out there but luckily there are ways that we can protect our tweens online (and not just from embarrassing Tik Tok dances).
Online safety didn’t exist for us as tweens, once a year we’d all be called into an assembly at school, and they’d show us a scary video of a young girl getting catfished by an old man. But, that never stopped us from spending many a sleepover browsing through ‘Omegle’ (if you don’t know what that is, count yourself lucky!). So, I get that you can preach all you want, but tweens have minds of their own, the best we can do is teach them from our own internet faux pas.
In the coming weeks, I’m going to guide you on how you and your tweens can stay as safe as possible in the online sphere- we’re doing more than just an assembly here! As someone lives and breathes social media (my screen time is 9 hours a day…eek!) you can trust that I have lived through these experiences myself. I look forward to helping you foster a safe online space, feel free to email me with any questions holly@weblaire.com x
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