Supporting Your Child's Digital Wellbeing
There is a great deal of discussion in society concerning the nature of wellbeing, what impacts us negatively and whether happiness and wellbeing can be measured in concrete terms.
In 2006 Sue Palmer, a former Primary Head teacher wrote a book entitled Toxic Childhood, How the Modern World is Damaging Our Children. One of the central themes is the nature of children's lives online and the negative pressure associate with social media.
Digital wellbeing can be affected by multiple factors, including time spent on devices, how we interact with others and what we are exposed to. When time on screen isn't balanced by being physically active and interacting with people in the real world, and when we are exposed to negative influences and online abuse this can be seriously detrimental to both physical and mental wellbeing.
Whilst we as a school work with our students to educate them about keeping themselves safe online, about balancing their screen time with enjoyable offline activities and about using social media for positive reasons, like all schools currently we find ourselves too often having to deal with the negative face of virtual life; online bullying, inappropriate content and the damaging impact to self esteem of distorted messages about cultural expectations around looks and body image.
As parents we need your support in guiding our young people to make safe, healthy choices with regard to their online activity. An excellent starting point is to ensure that accounts have the correct profile settings to provide maximum safety whilst online. A useful guide to help you can be found here:
https://swgfl.org.uk/resources/checklists/
If you already have concerns regarding inappropriate online behaviour you may also find these resources of help:
https://www.nspcc.org.uk/keeping-children-safe/online-safety/inappropriate-explicit-content/distressing-content/https://www.thinkuknow.co.uk/parents/articles/parental-controls/
Post COVID-19 technology will continue to play a more active role in education and in society. It is vital that we work together to support young people to lead safe and happy online lives.