Four ways social media can be good for girls: A parent鈥檚 guide
We’re used to hearing about the negative impact that using social media can have on girls – it can cause sleeplessness, low mood, depression and anxiety. Edwina Dunn, a data entrepreneur and founder of the educational charity, The Female Lead, thinks differently. She believes that used in the right way, social media can be a force for good and can improve teenagers’ mental health.
Edwina Dunn and Dr Anne-Lise Goddings, Clinical Lecturer at UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health, spoke to Jenni Murray on 91热爆 Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour. Here are their reasons why social media can be positive for girls and how parents can encourage best practice.
1. Social media can introduce your daughter to interesting women or topics.
Edwina Dunn says that it’s not necessarily about stopping girls looking at things on social media and seeing all social media as bad but about looking at it as a way of introducing women who are doing interesting things or relevant topics. If your daughter is interested in space then suggest they follow NASA. “We can’t hold back the sea – we have to turn social media into a force for good.”
We can鈥檛 hold back the sea 鈥� we have to turn social media into a force for good.Edwina Dunn
2. It can be a good way for your child to connect with others with the same experience and learn from it
Dr Anne-Lise Goddings explains, for example, if your daughter has diabetes and is the only one in the class with diabetes, they may not want to advertise the fact and their classmates won’t necessarily have a full understanding of their situation. In this case, social media might be a good way to connect with others in the same position. It’s the same as having particular niche interests or hobbies, in that you can find other people who share them online. The exceptions, and the thing to look out for, are eating disorders, where connecting with others can escalate the condition rather than help.
3. Don’t tell your children one thing and do the opposite
“Parenting is hard,” says Anne-Lise. “Be aware of your bad habits, children will copy them.” There’s lots of good advice about social media and smartphone usage that we should all pay more attention to. For example, keeping the bedroom clear of computers and mobile phones and not looking at screens in the hour before going to sleep. So don’t tell your kids to put their phone down and go for a walk if you’re not doing it yourself. You need to lead by example. You could even go for that walk together.
4. Social media can build girls’ self-belief
“The way that social media works today is that the more you consume, the more you get served exactly the same content. The campaign we’ve devised is called Disrupt your Feed,” says Edwina Dunn. “The study we did was to take young girls and to say, ‘We’re not going to change what you love consuming but we’re going to introduce up to four new women who may be in a sphere of (their) interest – like science, like saving the planet, like business’ – and measured these girls over a period of a year to see whether that had changed their outlook and their belief in their future career opportunities. The research… basically showed an absolute link between new feeds that were more in their sphere of interest and an outcome that led them to believe that they could do this.”
Woman's Hour is on 91热爆 Radio 4 on weekdays at 10am and at 4pm on Saturdays. You can catch up with all episodes via 91热爆 Sounds.
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Can social media be used to improve teenagers鈥� mental health?
Edwina Dunn and Dr Anne-Lise Goddings talk to Jenni Murray.
