Teachers, if you are looking for a support tool to help your students’ parents to understand the world their kids are living in, this should help. It’s a FREE PDF with ten tips (well, eleven!) which will help parents to see the online challenges their young people face and how to open debate with their children and keep them safe as they embark on their own lives and relationships. (There’s also some tips for parents on time management and perspective!) It’s packed with research and findings that will back up the tips too.
Please feel free to sign up for the downloadable PDF and share it with your parents, send it around the staff emails and share with your PSHE / RSE team as well as your SLT.
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Most parents will have heard about the dangers of online content that their teens and pre-teens are accessing on their phones.
Most parents will know about the dangers of ‘p0rn’.
Most parents will know about influencers like Andrew Tate and his brand of ‘toxic’ masculinity.
Most parents will know about the addictiveness of TikTok and how it’s leading to young people to undertake dangerous ‘prank’ trends and diagnose themselves with mental health problems.
I’m sure many parents will feel out of touch and at a time when teenagers are prone to challenging behaviours, many won’t want to exacerbate already fragile relations within their family.
Many parents won’t want to rock the boat.
Many parents may be so invested in their own lives, social media, emails and their working days – which have somehow bled into plenty of our own leisure time – that they may not notice the subtle shifts in their young people that suddenly it’s like you’re speaking a different language.
Parents thinking back to their own adolescence will recall the challenges they felt communicating with ever-more-distant and stressed parents and wondering why they were getting so upset, you know as a teen ‘everything will be fine’ and that they should just ‘you know, relax a bit’.
Modern youth now has an internet that doesn’t forget anything, that encourages them to take ever-more-risky online behaviours, an adulthood slipping into their childhood and a dozen platforms that need careful curation and attention to keep their friendships and social lives up-to-speed.
So, as parents, what do they need to know? Here are ten different tips and tricks to help parents understand and support their teens.
PDF will be emailed separately.