Why do you allow your teen on Snapchat?

I completely agree with your point regarding news content via social media. Which is why we regularly talk to her about fact checking, biased algorithms, companies like Cambridge Analytica etc. It is vitally important she learns about this. It is vitally important that everyone does but especially teenagers.

But as I said, she will search up anything to do with Gaza, so she will see whatever limited information is coming out regardless of whether or not she has Snapchat. She is 16 and far too old to be sheltered, she’ll be moving out within the next 18 months. She needs to learn to protect herself from the horrors of the world. She knows I avoid the news as I find it too upsetting at times. Hopefully one day she will follow my lead.

My DS is exactly the same. I managed to get the smartphone off him as he got in trouble at school for being part of a group that played pranks etc. He now has a Nokia brick and is fine as he knows it is his fault and not mine! Ironically I am so pleased he got in trouble at school because it was a daily battle policing his smartphone and now there is no stress at home and everyone is a lot more relaxed and happy!

How do you check it when the messages disappear?

Mine do not have it and will not be getting it until at least 14. It's widely used for drug running within the locality. Children are lured into the drug scene by so called new friends. I get told I'm strict and everyone else has it but I do not care. I work within protection services so see the damage it causes. I feel the same about Instagram, Facebook and the rest too

Mine are on it and I check it regularly

Snapchat is the only thing I wont allow my almost 14 year old DD to have, and I would say I'm fairly relaxed about social media.

As far as im concerned, an app that deletes messages so they can't be logged or retrieved is an absolute hard no for me

Forbidding it doesn't make it more attractive - using it makes it more attractive, because it's highly addictive.

Why would you not use your time to educate your child about healthy social media habits and behaviours, instead of making it even more attractive by forbidding it and making it even more intriguing.
Surely we should be equipping children for dealing with things, rather than pretending they dont exist? Obviously age appropriated, but if a child is pld enough to operate the Internet, they will have seen worse than girls in bikinis dancing

I use it and no issues

I find it really odd that you wouldn't try to 'censor' your child seeing videos of people being killed. I am politically motivated but I don't use social media because it's terrible for my mental wellbeing to see things like that. You don't need to literally witness everything to care or be interested. Similarly, I wouldn't go to a public execution, or take my kids to one. What you see on social media is very different to what you might see on a mainstream news channel.

It's also really to come to a balanced, well-informed view of anything important from information that's come from social media, and that is really necessary to discuss with kids.

My parenting is none of your buisness....

They know that when they own / rent their own place they can make their own rules.

And yes, their phone contracts which are in my name belong to me.... simple as....

Age restrictions obviously don't mean 100% of children will never smoke, but it makes it a lot harder for them to smoke and means that some who would have smoked, will not smoke. To continue the analogy, even if you take a relatively relaxed attitude to your kid trying a cigarette, it's a rare parent who thinks it's a good idea to put the cigarette in the kid's hand.

Wow! So is everything you pay for “yours”? Do they live day to day knowing that unless they paid for something you can take it away at any moment because you paid for it?

When are you planning on giving them some freedom?

Girls dancing in bikinis isn’t soft porn, it’s just girls in bikinis. Do you make him wear a blindfold at the beach?

Mine have it 15 and 17 but have had it for a couple of years - it’s how kids communicate - so they would have been out of the loop without it - we have parental controls on our broadband . Never seen anything dodgy . Literally only allowed TikTok in the last few weeks - I said no years ago and they’ve only just asked again 😂

Then I’m not really sure why you’re disagreeing with me 🤷‍♀️

Your DD has Snapchat and other social media with open lines of communication with her parents as does mine.

My comments were about those who blanket ban these things as opposed to teaching their teens how to exist in a social media world safely.

If they have access to the internet then they have access to porn. They don’t need Snapchat for that. Banning it can make it forbidden fruit that’s the trouble.

She now has both. I don’t think they’re particularly the same, to be honest.

And it’s got nothing to do with not trusting her and everything to do with not trusting anyone else, including the makers of the app.

But I don’t have to be consistent. I just have to be in charge - parenting, adulting.

I'm absolutely in the educate them to use it safely camp.

My teens are allowed Snapchat because I needed them to have it while they're young enough to have to listen to me when I speak 🤣 and trust me to know better. DS is approaching 16 now and has been absolutely fine, DD is 13 and hasn't had any problems so far.

The rules in our house are SM wide not just for Snapchat and are quite basic.. don't message/reply to anyone you don't know, bring me anything that makes you feel uncomfortable even if you can't explain why or aren't sure. Spot checks happen if someone is inexplicably moody/quiet. I've never found anything bad. DS is pretty much monosyllabic game invites, DD gets loads of photos of her friends being silly, and requests to video call. Kids can handle this stuff with guidance.

My children are 12 and 14.

They dont and wont be having snapchat. (nor do they have tictoc / insta / fb or any other SM)

We also have no screens at all upstairs. (no TV / phone etc)

They manage to waste enough time on whatsapp, chatting with their friends... they wont be having anything else.

Also, as I pay for their phone SIMs I consider their phones to be "mine"

Snapchat is not too dissimilar to Insta. Allowing one but not the other is odd imo.

You either trust your child to use social media responsibly or you don’t.

Ii really was just reflecting on how positive people were about it rather than agreeing with a ban as such. I dont think a ban for an individual would help anyway. They'd just be left out. But the wider implications of us leaving young people completely unregulated on things like tik tok and snap chat but over protecting them in the real world are playing out very negativily in schools.

It didn't really sound like people were aware of the risks and suggesting ways to promote safeguarding like ensuring children can recognise the different types of harm and how to report them. They seem to be much more 'its all fine, nothing to see here and we couldn't stop them anyway'.

DD didn’t. We had a perfectly sensible chat about these things, and come back to them frequently. She has to get DH’s percolation to download an app, it’s linked to his phone. The only thing she did was set up an instagram account but she told me pretty quickly she’d done it and so I created an account too and followed her.

Not all teens are sneaking around behind their well-meaning parents’ backs. Some of us are lucky enough to have good relationships with them. Some teens simply aren’t interested in this kind of thing. So some of us are comfortable in not being that permissive.

A woman in a bikini is not soft core porn.

Strange view of women.

Does age restrictions on smoking mean teens don’t smoke or that they just do it behind their parent’s backs?

You are proving my point. If a teen doesn’t agree with a ban then they are likely to just do it regardless, shrouded in secrecy, and will never come to their parents about an issue if it means owning up to breaking an imposed ban.