Parents play a critical role in influencing their children's relationship with social media and the parents' awareness of the topic is a key factor. Video by Annika Rhoades.
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00:00So we've got a 14-year-old daughter and she uses her technology quite a lot.
00:08She's got an iPad and a mobile phone.
00:11In Simon Holmes's household two of his three children are at the age
00:14where much of their communication with friends is through social media.
00:19Probably feel that to teach them how to use it responsibly
00:23they need to be using it and we just try and monitor their usage of it.
00:28It comes amid a national debate around raising the age of social media usage in Australia.
00:34Lots of conversation around raising the legal age kids can join social media to 16.
00:41There are so many parents now that hand devices over to kids without any restrictions without
00:47any controls and really have this experience that we kind of jokingly refer to as not my child
00:55you know it's not going to happen to my child my child's a good kid.
00:59Nevertheless building and maintaining a respectful relationship between children
01:04tech and socials is important.
01:06The positives would be at least for our situation because Arlo is autistic
01:12is that it really does help with his social skills learning the rules that we all take for granted.
01:19But the negative parts would definitely be the addictive nature.
01:23Arlo is hyper focused on the things that he's interested in you know
01:27screen time is something all games that is something that he's
01:31one of the things he's really focused on.