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Do you know all or most if your children’s friends? Don’t be fooled, if you are past the play date years the answer is almost definitely no, it’s impossible! My sixteen year old has 1432 friends, no, that’s not a typo, she has 1432 friends. They follow her around on a daily basis knowing where she is in real time, who she is with and what she is doing on a constant basis. Some want to be her, some chastise her, some love her and some despise her. Most don’t know her.
She belongs to the “double tap” generation where popularity is judged on how many likes you can get on your page or picture. She is smart, beautiful, kind, and an all around great kid. Why would this strong young woman, allow the approval of these 1432 people give any meaning to her life. The answer: They are her “friends”, at least as her generation knows them. This is the acceptance, the interaction, and play date of the 2K kids, not in entirety of course, but to a greater degree than most would ever imagine. It is our job as parents to keep reminding them their value is so much more than the double tap of a near stranger. Unfortunately, if we are to do our job as diligent parents we need to tell our children that most of the people whom they think of as friends in their lives, are mere characters in social media’s book of fiction.
I once had another mother over one day and my daughter had made a comment to me about how she got “a lot of likes” on a certain picture. The woman showed disgust in the fact that my daughter would even care about how many likes she got on her Instagram. She felt it was rather shallow of her to care and went on to tell her how ridiculous it was for her to even care. Fast forward one week, this same woman’s child posts a picture of a beautiful dessert she had made and the double taps where coming, this same mother was thrilled and kept asking “how many likes now?”. Didn’t she take her own advice?
It’s human nature to want approval, validation, and to have friends. But what is so very important at this point in our children’s lives is to remind them, constantly, that these social media outlets may their source of interaction, but they are merely works of fiction meant for entertainment purposes only. That of the 1432 “friends” they have now in their story, 1428 will have absolutely, positively, no baring on their amazing autobiography.
Need 2 Be Real 