Do you know what your teens are doing on TikTok? As a parent, you should.
This guide will help you navigate through the relationship your teen is having with this popular app. What do parents really need to know about TikTok? After shattering download and usage records, TikTok is one of the most-used apps among young people. According to Comscore, 32.5% of its US user base is between the ages of 10 and 19.
In fact, it is believed that young people ages 4 to 15 have spent on average 80 minutes per day on the app! If those TikTok stats weren’t jaw-dropping, those usage stats should be. The chances of your teen either seeing something on TikTok or having the app is pretty high. Do you know what your teens are doing on TikTok?
5 Simple Ways To Talk To Your Teen About TikTok
There are so many ways and parenting advice how-tos for having conversations about life with your teen. Some of those advice tips are great and some of them are not so great. Parenting around TikTok can be rough, especially if the app is already ingrained in the social fabric of our teens’ lives. Have no fear. DDID is here to help! These are just some of the easy and effective approaches that work and will have results. Remember: You’re not going to create this amazing culture of communication and openness in a day. This might take time. Be patient. Try one for the next week and then add another a week later until you’ve hit that desired environment where TikTok isn’t the enemy.
Here are 5 simple ways to talk to your teen about TikTok:
Be Transparent
If you’re going to set limits, restrictions, monitoring, a responsible thing to do as a parent is to let your teen know! Privacy is important to them and if you’re monitoring their behavior without them knowing, they may feel betrayed and/or lose trust in you. Back in the day, we HATED parents who would read our journals. The problem is those journals didn’t impact us the way smartphones and apps do. Explain to your teen why you’re putting on limits and monitoring. Let them know it’s not to make sure they aren’t doing anything bad, but the goal is to protect them. They may not understand this concept, but come up with some examples of how these limits and restrictions can help them.
Set Healthy Screen Limits With TikTok
This is a hard one for parents to manage. Many pediatricians recommend that teens and children are active at least 15 minutes for every hour of screen time. Some parents use screen time as digital currency whereas if they want to unlock 15 more minutes of TikTok time, they need to go outside and exercise for 15 minutes, do the dishes, or do some other chore for 15 minutes. This is an effective hack to make your teen really aware of time because they tend to lose track of when using apps. So how much time? Most pediatricians recommend limiting overall screen time to two hours a day, not including school work and activities. But again…understand the purpose of that time as well. There are a lot of cool things on TikTok, constructive videos, how-to videos. If your teen and their friends are learning to cook a cake and they’re streaming through 30-40 minutes of those kinds of TikToks (the educational time), that may not count towards their overall two-hour limit. Set healthy TikTok limits within the context of what they’re consuming.
Talk About The TikTok Media and Videos They’re Consuming
The simple act of just talking to your teen is one of the most undervalued parenting hacks. Oftentimes, you’ll be able to pick up on something wrong or what’s bothering them with simple conversations. Don’t overthink this either! It’s easy. Start with: “So I noticed you spent a lot of time today on TikTok? Find anything funny or worth sharing with me?” Or “Did you see that Clothes Line Dance on TikTok yet? It is awesome!” This might require you to actually be part of the universe your teen is living in, but that’s what parenting is all about. It’s about connection and helping your teen make sense of their identity and their world.
Create An Open Environment For Discussion
The number one rule with parenting TikTok: Never trigger shame. If your teen is using and consuming media, it’s not a matter of if, but when they’re going to see or hear something inappropriate. The question you should ask is: How do I want them to respond when that moment arrives? When I’m not there. Do you want them to hide it? Or do you want them to talk to you about it? The best way to create an open environment is to talk about moments where we’ve made mistakes or been involved in these uneasy moments and what we did. It comes back to some of these other parenting tips: just talking and being involved.
Be Involved
As mentioned above, this little advice hack can do wonders with parenting TikTok. This doesn’t mean you have to download TikTok and follow the same users and subscribe to the same feeds as your teen. But encourage your teen to share what they’re looking at with you. Watch some videos together. Laugh together. Cry together. What will happen is your teen will know you’re not a threat. This tip also has another dual-layer that accompanies it, as you become involved in their world you’ll pick up on the little nuances of their tech environment. Many times the apps we use will roll out updates that will have an impact on its users. Personal information, facial recognition data storage, access to cameras and mics, new ways feeds are displayed and shared, etc. are a handful of these ways. Being involved will help you stay ahead of the curve, so you’re being proactive instead of reactive.
Remember The Goal Of Parenting Around TikTok
Trying to navigate through these waters of parenting in a tech world is not easy. Just remember: making these little adjustments and having these good conversations will not happen immediately. It’s going to take time to create a culture where your teen learns to leverage technology and media for good. You might be in a situation where technology is controlling your family. We feel your pain. Welcome to the club! Welcome to parenting in the 21st century. Join the millions of parents out there trying to find a better way.
Just by trying, you’re making an impact. The entire goal in all of this, whether it’s TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Fortnite, or Call Of Duty, is to work WITH technology so that it can empower our lives. We can do that through effective communication with our teens where we build a culture in our homes of openness, happiness, and empowerment.
