Online bullying has become a major problem for parents these days. Smartphones, tablets and the Internet access has made bullying highly influential. Gone is the time when children were able to cut them off from outside world once they get back home. Nowadays, due to the popularity of social media apps, children are vulnerable to bullying no matter where they go.
Here are a few things parents need to teach their children to prepare them for any case of bullying.
1. Stay Calm
Children usually react impulsively and take matters a little too seriously. Warning your kids about cyberbullying before it has ever happened to them helps kids in understanding the situation in an appropriate manner. It makes them able to think more clearly. As a parent, teach your kids:
- Don’t respond to each and everything on social media. Unless it is designated especially to you, don’t make it upset you.
- Block the bullies from all social site and messaging apps.
2. Get it together
Educate your child how to deal with bullies, you can teach them a few useful things such as:
- Gather all the things a bully has done to you. Don’t delete any hate message you have received from them.
- Ask children not to respond in a nasty way. Most of the time children react even more badly than a bully and a series of bullying incident start from there.
Parents need to make their children realize that they can take action against bullies through proper channel. They don’t need to hide in fear of bullies.
3. Take an Adult on board
The thing which parents need to put most emphasis on is involving an adult in the matter. Keep an open line of communication with your child. They should feel comfortable to come to you in the case of any issue. Make sure your child feels secure enough to speak up to you.
Use Parental Control Apps
Online bullying can be extremely daunting for children to deal with. Parents need to stay aware of what their kids are dealing with before it is too late. To monitor your child’s digital activities, take help from parental control apps.
Parental control apps such as FamilyTime enable parents to monitor text messages and call logs on their child’s mobile device. Parents can even put certain contacts on the watchlist and can receive alerts from FamilyTime if there is an interaction between that contact and their kids.
You can get this parental control app from iTunes or Google play store. Read this for more tips on dealing with cyber bulling and read my post about teaching children about social media here.
Are you concerned about online bullying? How have you been addressing the issue? Do share in a comment below.
As this is something that I didn’t need to tackle when my children were growing up, I found this an interesting read
This is something I worry about constantly, not as a parent but as a grandparent! My grandchildren are entering that area of peer pressure & playground pestering that adults are not privy too. I am a silver surfer (over 50) & like to think I’m pretty savvy, I have a Twitter account, use WhatsApp & G+, however I don’t use Face Book as I feel it’s extremely intrusive. So I am taking the route of making it fun by doing competitions across the different social platforms & making it a family affair, sitting down and sharing what we’ve done so, ‘hopefully’ because they are so used of an adult wanting (not needing) to go through their posts etc. it’ll be second nature for them to want to say “have you seen this granddad” or “I’ve blocked this”, making it a family affair.
My family uses parental control app. It is called Kidslox ( http://www.kidslox.com ). It is easy in usage and I find it very helpful in combination with our family rules. A month ago it was so hard to make my kids follow the rules and do not use their mobile phones so often. I even noticed that my son started to lose his eyesight because he used his phone to watch some movies in the evening, hiding from me under the blanket. ((( This app is a good in limiting screen time for my son.