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Writer's pictureUnloveable Dad - Curt

I Hate My Kid's Social Media Posts, But What Can I Do as a Parent to Get Them to Change What They Post?



Hate Your Kid’s Social Media??? Transcript


Curt Dalton (00:00)

Hey everybody, this is Curt with MAYA For Life with our Purple Princess today, Preeti, and we have a social media question for you. All right, Preeti, if you hate your child's social media post on Instagram or Snap or whatever the latest thing is these days, what are your options? Should you A, take their phone away, shut their accounts down and lock them up, both the child and the phone? B,


Preeti (00:07)

Mm -hmm.


Curt Dalton (00:23)

Should you monitor, talk to your husband or wife or partner and keep talking and murmuring about it? Or C, talk to your child and try to get to the cause and the root of what they're expressing on social media and why? Go.


Preeti (00:36)

Okay, well I will tell you what's actually happening. Moms across America are going to brunch and getting angry. I don't know how many times I have been to brunch or lunch with a mom who I mentioned something about social media. Social media is one of the issues that we address very directly and very early on at MAYA And they get out their phone immediately.


Curt Dalton (00:45)

Angry mom. French mom.


Preeti (01:02)

get on their daughter's social media and start hate scrolling through it, screaming expletives and getting pretty worked up over it. So I'm glad it's something that we actually are able to address at MAYA. The answer is social media isn't going anywhere. It is just becoming more and more a part of our daily lives. And while you and I and our generation can take solace in the fact that we did not live our our private lives in public. And I am very grateful that I didn't. That is not the reality for our kids. There's a lot of pressure for them to lead these lives out loud in public. There's a lot of pressure for them to be popular worldwide. I mean, it was not enough to just need to be popular in your school or with your group of friends or in your neighborhood. You now have to be popular on the internet. It's an awful lot of pressure.


And there's some different challenges for boys versus girls. I know that for girls, you get more likes the fewer clothes you wear. And there's a lot of pressure to grow up very early. And young girls are very interested in makeup and dressing up and wearing things that are quite provocative. And a lot of that is tied to likes. That's not necessarily a level of comfort that they have. They're doing a lot of mimicking.


They're mimicking the older girls, they're mimicking adults, but they have so much access to it that they're starting much, much younger. And it's alarming for parents. It's definitely not something that we're comfortable with. And for boys and also for girls, it's substance use. You get to an age and you start to experiment with sex and drugs and alcohol, and those are all...normal things that happen as part of healthy development, if we teach our kids how to explore those things safely and in healthy environments. But it's all happening out in public. so, weed smoking is legal in so much of the world now, but doing it on your social media so that an employer or a college or an internship is going to see that, that's not your best foot forward. So our answer to this in MAYA and our MAYA parents absolutely love that we do this. What we require you to set all of your social media to private when you come into the MAYA program. And I'll explain why. One, we're not telling you to shut it down. And quite frankly, your parents want you to shut it down. We're not going that far because we do want to teach kids how to present themselves on social media. And we want to explain to them the difference between public social media versus private social media, and we recommend that kids have both. And then the second thing we do is we do a deep dive. We look at it together. I think the thing that I've been most surprised at in going through this process with our students is that they're not really aware that what they're doing is provocative. They're not aware of how it might look to an adult, to a prospective employer, to a teacher.


That's not the world that they're really invested in. They're invested in this world of likes with their peers and with their peers across the country and across the globe. And they're so kind of single minded about it that they're not thinking about consequences. And let's also say from a developmental perspective, they're not really capable of thinking of all the consequences. The impulse is high and this and the awareness of consequences is low. And having your parent yell at you about it, shut it down, take it away is terrifying for our kids because it's their lifeline. It's how they communicate with the outside world. It's how they feel like they belong. And taking that away, stripping that away from them, which is often a punishment that's used, is actually very detrimental. So we don't do that with our students, but we do shut everything down to private.


And then we talk about rebuilding. We talk about the next phase of that is actually what are the good uses of social media? How can you actually put your best foot forward? How can you be honest and transparent on social media in ways that are not gonna be detrimental to you down the line?


Curt Dalton (05:01)

I think you're right in the external validation model, which is what kids are doing, right? So whether it's a girl who's wearing a halter top or a half shirt or then the bikini, for those likes, mimicking their older sister, whatever they're trying to be older boys do the same. Now, unless you're this really great physique football player, boys generally want to mimic older kids, older boys who are what drinking, vaping, smoking. So it's putting posts up more about how bleeped up I am and how crazy I got Friday night and we had the vape pen or the cannabis pen out. So little different on the boy side, but it's the same external validation. The more likes you get, if you show that you're all high or you're drunk, just the same way a girl would put a bikini on who may be a little too young for it and get more likes. So the external validation, certainly from hearts and likes and thumbs up is the first thing you go to. that's how they're creating their identity and getting their confidence. again, that's the first thing you say, well, what's external validation? But let's talk about internal validation and why you need that. And it's much more important because if you live by external validation, you're always chasing the carrot, right? You got the stick over your shoulder with the carrot. You're never going to get enough likes and hearts. If you get 10, you want 20. If you get 50 likes or hearts, you want 60. And you just it's like a dopamine or an adrenaline rush so that each picture has to get more racy or provocative or crazy.


And again, we've seen influencers and people doing this stuff who die. They fall off bridges. They fall off the Grand Canyon a couple of times a year trying to get the craziest shot or one inch further than the last person. So it actually can end in death, but it can also end in, you know, more of an embarrassment on social media that what could go up and you're embarrassed or your family's embarrassed by it.


Preeti (06:38)

Right. And the other thing we do is we want to embrace it. We want to embrace it as a tool to actually showcase your best self. And when we do this social media audit with our students, they're kind of mortified because they didn't realize that that was the image that they were portraying. What they were trying to do, as you said, was look cool. But what they often look like is, frankly, desperate, like desperate for attention, desperate for popularity and that is something that actually resonates with them because it wasn't their intention. And self -respect is one of the things that we talk about with them. And there's nothing wrong with wearing a bikini. We're not trying to body shame kids either. It's just that if you're doing it as a means to an end, if you're wearing it to the beach, if you're wearing it to the pool, if you're wearing it because you feel good and confident in your body, regardless of your size, that's amazing, especially for girls. I'm completely in support of that.


But if you're doing it because the photo of you on spring break in the jeans shorts and the t -shirt didn't get any likes, but the one of you in the bikini at the pool got a lot of likes, and that's why you're doing it, then that's where the problem begins. The other thing that we do is we do a personal branding exercise with our students.


And this is where they can have agency and feel empowered by their social media and not so much disempowered, which is what chasing likes and chasing popularity on social media feels like internally to them. And we start to talk about who they are. What are their values? What are their interests? And it turns out that these kids are amazing. They're aware of what's happening in the world. The other thing about the internet is that they have a ton of information. They're not just looking up things that we would deem as frivolous or unnecessary. They're really aware of what's happening in society. They're aware of what's happening in their community and they care about things, I think, probably to a greater degree than I remember caring about at their age. And so when we start to drill down and talk about values and who they are, you see the lights come on and you see them start to be kind of excited. And that's when the internal validation begins to build where they're realizing they've got something that's pretty profound that has nothing to do with taking bong hits or being scantily clad on your social media. And that maybe they have something to say and maybe they have a platform and a voice to say it. And that is where some of, the most profound internal work comes from at MAYA. It's through this simple exercise that we do where we are able to get them to illustrate and to articulate in their own words who they are and who they want to be and how they want to move through this world. That gets them excited. Oftentimes they don't know themselves so well, they don't realize that those are their strengths. And when they start connecting the dots and the lights come on, you see that they're going to move through this world differently. They're going to move through this world with true confidence, with inner strength with self -worth and with the understanding that we don't need all the external validation in life and social media to feel really good about ourselves and to stand tall and proud in our bodies.


Curt Dalton (09:40)

You have 10 ,000 parents saying hell yeah. So how do they find us? How do they talk to us? How do they get to interview us and ask us questions?


Preeti (09:47)

Yeah, we'd love for you to reach out to us at MAYA4life.com. That's MAYA4life.com. And, you know, we can set up a chat, but really what we want is for you to get to know us through these videos. It's why we make them. You get to know our personalities a little bit. Curt and I work very closely with our kids. Well, there's also parents that you can talk to have been through the program and students. We'd love to put you in touch with them. There's been some, really big breakthroughs that we've made with our kids over this last year.


And they're so excited about the program. They want to share that with you as well. And the other thing, as you mentioned, is that it's a big deal for you to trust us with your kids. We want you to be comfortable. We're confident that we can be helpful. We've seen so many different issues. We've been able to help kids with so many different challenges that they're facing.


and they're all thriving in one way or another. And so we're confident that we can help your kid, but we want you to be confident too. So give us a call, send us a text, send us an email, find us on our website and ask us some questions. And also any question that you submit on our website, we'll probably make a video about. So, you you can get a little insight into how we work that way as well.


Curt Dalton (10:57)

Alright, so it's MAYA4life.com MAYA4life.com click on the contact us or Book now or check out some of the videos


Preeti (11:06)

Thanks so much, Curt. This was fun. Feeling better. Okay, we're getting it.


Curt Dalton (11:08)

You're welcome.


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