Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: Here's a solution to handling kids and social media

Heather du Plessis-Allan Drive

About this debate in Australia on banning social media for kids - I have just come across an article that makes the best comparison yet for how we should deal with this issue.

Treat it like sex.

This article is by an academic in Australia and she argues that the best way to protect kids from social media is by teaching them its dangers, like we do with sex.

I think we know now that banning sex for teens doesn't work, celibacy all the way through to marriage doesn’t work - and the best way to deal with it is with sex education.

We teach kids how the whole thing works, we teach them how to be safe, and most kids actually do end up fine. That, she says, is how we should treat social media.

Teach the kids how it works, teach them about the algorithms that push information at you, teach them that if you click something you’ll get more of the same, teach them how the perfect model lying by the pool with her perfect boyfriend on the perfect holiday is just a photo and it's not real.

And teach them how to be safe, teach them not to look at certain things, show them how to talk about what they see if it upsets them and so on.

But with sex - we do ban it as well. We say kids under sixteen cannot legally have sex, we put these guardrails up, and I think we should do that with social media too, if only as a guardrail.

For kids under a certain age, ban it. No social media.

But ban it knowing the ban is just a guardrail - it's not going to work. Most kids are going to flout it because if it doesn't work for sex, it won't work for social media. But educate them as well, that is the most important part.

If we think about it like that - kids will do this thing you don't want them to do, if you ban them from doing it, they'll do it anyway. Then you understand the best thing you can do as a parent and an educator is teach the kids how to do it safely.

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