In 2012, Youth Ministry gurus Adam McLane and Mark Oestreicher wrote a book called, “A Parent’s Guide to Understanding Social Media: Helping Your Teenager Navigate Life Online“. As the title says the book is a social media guide for parents so that they can understand this whole new world in hopes that they can help their teen navigate it.
The reason why I read the book was because 1. I am both a parent of tweens who own social media accounts and 2. I am a Youth Pastor so I can help the parents I minister to. Plus, I know that Adam is very involved in social media so he knows what he is talking about from experience work with teens and in the digital world. As we live in a very evolving tech world, a world in which students communicate so much on their cell phones, we need to understand how to best minister to and love them.
A few things that really stuck out to me were…
- The more parents can understand social media instead of building walls of protection against it, the more they can help their teenager move towards adulthood successfully.
- What I found really interesting is that they said research shows the more parents try to restrict the process of individualization of teens, the more it drives teens to deviance, secrecy and a lack of communication. This is really important to understand this for parents so that there can be open discussions about what they are involved in rather than secrets.
- This being said, in a world where everything is documented, every success and failure, they encourage parents to be checking up on their teens through social media and seeing what they are doing on their personal accounts.