Ask Allison: My teen just joined social media. Should I follow them?

Dear Allison, My teenage daughter recently joined Instagram, and we are debating whether we should follow her or give her some privacy. What’s the best advice for a new-to-social-media teen and her parents? Signed, Feeling like a snoop

When I first saw this question, I thought it was a no-brainer. As the parent of two teens — I have a freshman in college and a junior in high school — I honestly just assumed that following them on Instagram was the norm. Not only because I think it’s important to know what they’re up to, but also, in some cases, it’s how I get a peek behind the scenes of what they are doing — fun candids with friends, my college student’s extracurriculars, hilarious memes that only Gen Z would find.

But then I realized: While I do follow them on Instagram, I don’t really pay attention to TikTok, and I genuinely have no clue how Snapchat works. (If you need to call me geriatric, that’s OK, I can accept it.) I trust my kids pretty implicitly, and importantly, starting when they were much younger, we’ve had a lot of conversations about what is and isn’t acceptable to share publicly. Even so, when I dug deeper into this question, I realized that I, like many parents, may have some blind spots.

So I reached out to Susan Zinn, a licensed psychotherapist and the founder of Westside Counseling Center in Los Angeles, for some guidance. Our conversation was clarifying and educational. Social media can be, of course, riotously fun — my daughter and I swap dog memes and Taylor Swift videos all day — but there is also a much more precarious side to it, especially for teens whose brains are not yet fully developed and who may be extremely nimble with technology in general but less so when it comes to the pitfalls and downsides of social media. “There’s a direct correlation between social media use and mental health,” Zinn says, and thus she urges parents to take a hands-on approach, even if your teen is resisting and even if you are a fairly hands-off parent.

“In today’s wild Wild West online, it is better to be overcautious, have weekly conversations around social media usage and model your own healthy social media habits to your teens,” she says. Many parents have heard stories of kids posting inappropriate pictures or comments that can get flagged by schools or peers, but there are even darker elements to these apps, Zinn notes, such as cyberbullying, being the recipient of inappropriate photos and in the worst cases, stalking. While my own kids have been fortunate enough to never experience these extremes, we have definitely had conversations about removing a picture or post that we, as parents, had to draw a line on. That’s not because my kids meant any harm by the images or statements, but because teenagers may not have thought through all the angles and connotations of a seemingly innocuous photo or post. Every parent with a teenager has been subject to their occasional moodiness and impulsivity, which is all developmentally normal, but Zinn reminds us that online impulsivity can be as problematic as real-life impulsivity, with truly damaging consequences. After all, as we all know, your internet footprint can trail you forever. So if you’re not keeping an eye on what they post — and who they are communicating with — you risk things going awry.

This doesn’t mean that you have to hover or be deemed a dreaded helicopter parent. In my household, because we started the conversations around social media early on — something Zinn notes is critical to having a healthy online presence — I feel relatively comfortable with giving my own kids latitude, and there is a difference between monitoring a 13-year-old and a freshman in college, of course. But if your kids start to push back, demanding total freedom online, and don’t want you to follow them at all (or if they hide posts or stories from you), Zinn says, it’s time to impose your own boundary. It’s not about trying to micromanage them or their lives, but rather it’s to keep your kids safe, which is the entire point of parenting after all.

“Parents forget that most of them pay for their teens’ devices,” she says, reminding us that we really are in charge. “And we need to remember if a teen isn’t showing good judgment or is hiding their behavior online, their choices on social media will not improve magically without negative consequences that can be life-altering. Unsupervised social media use is more likely to expose children to potentially harmful content and features.” In essence, it’s better to be proactive with your child now than let them flounder and end up in a perilous situation — whether it’s as extreme as having a college acceptance revoked or getting suspended from school (two incidents I know of in real life), or something less public but no less insidious, such as being the target of a bully or being a bully themselves.

Helpfully, Zinn also directed me to the American Psychological Association, which has issued guidelines on healthy social media use in adolescence. And as with so much of parenting, particularly parenting of teens, a lot of this boils down to communication. Talk to your kids about what they’re seeing online, talk to them about deciphering misinformation from reality (an enormous problem right now), talk to them about how posts make them feel, talk to them about what their peers are doing and if they are comfortable with making those same decisions.

After having a lengthy chat with Zinn, I was left with a few conclusions:

1. That to answer your original question: Absolutely, you should follow your child who is new to social media, if only as a safety net to ensure that she is making smart decisions.

2. That even as our kids get older, like my freshman in college, they still need our support, and we shouldn’t feel embarrassed or as if we are infantilizing our children for offering it! Just because teens developmentally want to push us away doesn’t mean that we have to allow them to push us off a cliff entirely.

3. That despite all of the complications of social media, I’m so glad that I do connect with my kids online. I wouldn’t want to not follow them — they’re hilarious and fun, and sometimes something they post takes on the world that I didn’t even know they had considered. Don’t miss out on that.

So yes, follow your kid, talk to your kid, engage with your kid — not just on social media but holistically, in all aspects of their life. Then, when you click on their stories on Instagram, you can do so trusting that they will make smart decisions. And if for some reason they don’t, you’ll be right there in the weeds with them, lending them a hand to pull them out of it.

Need more help demystifying the experience of parenting teens? Email [email protected] with all of your queries for a future column.