10 Parenting Ways to Safeguard Your Teen’s Facebook Presence

Which amongst these two can be more addictive? Facebook for teenagers or caffeine for coffee lovers?

If you are still struggling with the options, let me help you with the recent survey, which states Facebook fever is today’s tech-centric teen’s most obsessed activity!

With kid’s life shrinking between Facebook’s likes and dislikes, parents’ stress level is increasing in worry of today’s smartphone addiction to tomorrow’s possible cybercrime!

Are our teens safe on Facebook? Can our parenting be part of his safe social media exposure?

Here we present ten ways to secure your teen’s facebook-ing!

Set the default audience private

No one can stop a teenager from creating his Facebook account! They are excited to begin their digital life.

• Once they create a new account, you can sit with them and check basic -default settings.
• Make sure they keep their profile private.
• This ensures they are posting their pictures and statuses to their friends and family members only and, not to the random-unknown people!
• You can set the default audience from the settings menu.

Follow Facebook rules

Facebook sets out a few rules to ensure safety while using it. These rules are meant to be followed. 

• Make sure your child does not use Facebook if he is under the age of 13.
• Do not lie the age. When a 14-year-old teen claims to be 17 on Facebook, he is inviting trouble.
• Facebook has specific safety measures and filters to safeguard younger teens.
• Exercise your parental controls to make them learn and respect the rules and regulations of Facebook.

Friend Requests Settings

Your teens should be friends with someone on Facebook who they really know in real life.

• Teens should know that adding strangers on their account can be risky.
• You can’t stop strangers from sending friend requests to your teen on Facebook, but you can restrict who can send friend requests!
• Go to the settings and in the privacy section – ‘who can send you friend requests,’ select friends of friends, and secure your teens from strangers.

Make Facebook Exclusive Profiles

While parents monitor social media, they must ensure their kid’s visibility is not easily accessible by other search engine platforms.

• Stop popping up your teen’s Facebook profile in google or any other search engines.
• Head to the privacy settings to change this visibility.
• uncheck the tick box which asks you to link your profile with other search engines.

Use Block And Report

Protect your teens by educating them about the importance of blocking someone. This is the easiest way to save them from harmful posts and content.

• Facebook allows us to block and report anyone(known or unknown contacts)kids don’t want to be friends with.
• To block someone, you can go to privacy settings and select block.
• To report a particular post, you can click the drop-down menu from the right side and choose-“report this post.”

Choose A Strong Password

Password hacking paves the way for cybercrime. Facebook for teenagers can be safe with a strong password.

• Parents should ensure their teens set a strong and difficult to copy/remember a password that can’t be easily accessible by anyone else.
• It should be with the combination of upper and lower case letters, special characters, and numbers.
• Do not allow them to set their date of birth or pet’s name for a password, as these are easy ways to trace their identity.
• Also, make sure they do not share a password with anyone.

Watch His Posts

Even if your teen has limited Facebook friends, his post can be seen by a large number of people.

• It is crucial to watch the teen’s post closely to save him from possible danger.
• A post with personal information such as dates and place of your holiday plan, date of birth of a family person, school and class information may lead to risk.
• Posting too many photos and inappropriate images can ruin the teen’s online image.

Exercise Screen Time Control Tools

This is not directly associated with facebook safety, but it ensures limited screen time and, in a way, safeguard teens from feasible online threats.

• A prolonged Facebook presence may invite strangers and other online predators.
• These people carefully observe your chatting styles, duration of your Facebook usage, posting history, etc., and further, they can misuse this information.
• Use kid’s safety app to make them learn the screen time control. This can be a robust indirect way to safeguard their social media presence.

Study Facebook Tags

Review the photos and posts your kid is being tagged in on Facebook.

• Select the “timeline and tagging” in the privacy menu.
• Enable-‘Review posts that friends tag you in before they appear on your Timeline’, from the drop-down menu.
• Your teen will receive a notification once someone tags him, and he can decide whether he wants to be on their timeline or not.

Curb Facebook Addiction

Too much of anything is itself a danger! The most promising way to ensure safety is to enjoy something in a moderate amount. But your facebookie teen will not understand it until you restrict their obsession!

• A few parental control apps can assist you by scheduling his daily time limit to use Facebook and other apps.
• You can straightaway block bedtime device usage with such apps and curb the addiction.
• Set app time limits to execute strict parental controls.

These steps are hard to implement but undoubtedly rewarding! If used along with screen time control, it can successfully destroy social media compulsion.

A Bonus Tip To Conclude!

“If I am not on Facebook, for more than two days… Call the police!” – When 14-year-old teen posts this as his Facebook status, it might be cool at his age but absolutely worrisome for parents!

Curb such excessive Facebook fevers in its early stages. Such an addiction can invite feasible facebook threats. 

A child-shield -facebook exposure can be achieved when a teen follows all the measures mentioned above, and a parent uses a smart child monitoring app.

Be a digital parent, and keep your teens safe on Facebook!