Preteens And Social Media

The other day I was scrolling through Instagram and I got a follow request. I’m pretty careful about my online identity and any and all social media accounts that I have are private. I also don’t accept all follow requests even if I do know of the person. This request, however, was from one of my daughter’s friends. She was 10.  I know her well, and I knew there was nothing inappropriate for a 10 year old on my social media account so I accepted the request. Even though I was a bit confused.

Isn’t That A Little Young?

My first thought was, why does a 10 year old need Instagram?  And then right after that I thought, why does a 10 year old have her own cell phone?  Well it turns out the phone was used because of her many after school activities in case of emergencies. I understood that, but I was still wondering about the Instagram account. I spoke to her mother about it, and she said that she had access to the account and also had to approve any follower requests that her daughter made or any that her daughter received. It made sense to me.

I had some questions.

But then I started thinking about it. Could she see any comments that her daughter made on other photos? Could she see into any direct messages from Instagram that her daughter may receive? Or was she only following her in order to see her posts when she logged in, and she only had email notifications set up when follower requests were made or sent? And was I the only parent really concerned about all of the things that could potentially go wrong with kids online?

I did some research.

I started looking into it myself.  I, too, have a young daughter and while we do not allow her to be on social media right now, at some point she is going to want to be. Everyone else is, right? So how can we monitor this safely, and be assured that we are able to see everything that our daughter could send or receive?

I found an unexpected solution.

The surprising answer that I came up with was cell phone spying. It sounded a little extreme at first but what other way is there to completely monitor our child’s online activity? If I am going to allow her to be online, I need to make sure that I am watching out for her safety and that doesn’t only include approving follow requests. I want to make sure I can see what she is seeing.

It turns out that there are many products available to allow you to spy on a cell phone. Auto Forward supplies one of these products. You can see anything that has been sent to your child even if it has been deleted. It works with many social media accounts like Facebook, Twitter, Skype and others. It eased my mind, knowing that when my kids begin using these websites I can use cell phone spying so I can make sure that they are safe while online. By employing spy cell phones, I was empowering myself in a variety of ways. Every modern parent should do it.