Keeping children safe on social media: What parents should know to protect their kids

I think the big problem is during high school, at least in the states, and schools have to enforce a total ban. I hope society realizes this before my nephew is old enough.

Putting all of that on the shoulders of parents, he said, "is just simply not fair.”

I call bs on that, parents should have the will to want to protect their children and people need to raise their children to be smart enough to listen to what their parents tell them. They should be the ones putting their feet down and telling the kids social media is off limits until drinking age.

It is up to the parents to decide at which ages access, AND what access to any specific social media, should be. That goes for the internet as a whole, actually. Even if the kids gain access to places the parents want outside the home, at least the parents have made it clear which content is "ok" and which content is not.

The internet is a wondrous place, but also full of things children shouldn't see.

Before age 8, we didn't allow our child any internet access without direct supervision. They had a phone that was programmed to allow phone calls to 4 numbers only and provided tracking of their location.

At age 8, we provided while-list access to specific, educational, parts of the internet only. This was through /etc/hosts file setup - no DNS was allowed. The school and I had many disagreements over what was allowed.

At age 11, we used simple DNS filters to block sexual and violent content. Around age 13, I had to setup a proxy server at home that had DNS with these filters and make all devices inside our network use it if they wanted to access the internet at all. This setup is beyond most parents, but it is how the large corporations protect their workers. No direct internet access for any workstation. We still block nearly all social media and cloudy services at the network layer to prevent data leakage. Most of the blocking happens in the DNS server. Use a Pi-Hole if you are interested in more detailed content blocking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi-hole There are free and paid services like from OpenDNS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDNS.

When our daughter couldn't stand it anymore, we allowed her to save her money and buy a flip phone. Because she wasn't an adult, she couldn't sign a contract and was stuck on monthly pre-paid service. A few months, she lost service because she forgot to pay or didn't have money to cover it. Best to learn that lesson before heading off to college, right? She also learned that different levels of service cost differently and that paying for a year, in advance was cheaper - about 50% cheaper - than paying monthly. All good lessons. After a few years, that flip phone died and she really wanted an iPhone. I told her "good luck". She bought a used iPhone, then couldn't afford any cell plan for a few months. That was hard to watch, but extremely educational. She learned that it was possible to use the phone with just wifi for many tasks and if you were careful, even navigation worked, though her phone was really slow and wasn't using true GPS from satellites.

Anyway, she uses social networks over the cell connection, not our internet. That makes it clear we don't approve.