When your child is addicted to getting "likes"

Watch Video: When your child is addicted to getting "likes" by Yalda T. Uhls, MBA, PhD , ...
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When your child is addicted to getting "likes"

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Social networking sites, and many of these sites, have a built-in system for "likes" and for "followers," and "stars" on You Tube. Many kids start tracking that at a very young age; as soon as they start getting access to these kinds of tools. The problem is, kids are also,developmentally, at the age where they're starting to seek peer validation, peer status; they want to be popular, so these tools sort of feed that need and they enmesh themselves, so a kid wants to be really popular, and this is a way to validate them very easily by the number of comments or "likes" on a post. They start getting really, really into it, so (1) it's developmentally normal - even as a parent, sometimes I feel bad if someone doesn't comment on something I post, so it's nothing to be totally worried about, however, if you feel that they are starting to look at this stuff 24/7, and they're not really going out and socializing with friends face-to-face, that's when it may be a problem. So look at their offline social world, is something going on in their offline social world that they're trying to use the online world to seek validation and acceptance? If there is a problem in their offline world, help them navigate that world, they're still young, they need your help.

Watch Video: When your child is addicted to getting "likes" by Yalda T. Uhls, MBA, PhD , ...

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Yalda T. Uhls, MBA, PhD

Regional Director, Common Sense Media

Yalda T. Uhls, MBA, PhD, is the Regional Director of Common Sense Media, the leading non-profit dedicated to improving the lives of kids and families by providing the trustworthy information, education, and independent voice they need to thrive in a world of media and technology. Yalda's own research with the Children's Digital Media at UCLA was written about in the New York Times, CNN, Time Magazine, The Huffington Post, and more. As an expert on media’s effects on children, Yalda has been featured on the BBC News, KPCC, the LA Times and many other news outlets. Her awards include UCLA's Psychology in Action Award for excellence in communicating psychological research to audiences beyond academia as well as honorable mention for the National Science Foundation's GSRF. Yalda's former career as a Senior VP at MGM, in film production, informs her perspective that media content has great power to socialize children, to inspire and teach as well as to be used inappropriately. In her talks, she brings her deep knowledge of the latest research about how children ages eight to 18 use media, as well as a realistic understanding of how digital natives use media from her experiences with her two children, ages 10 and 13.  Her newest book, Media Moms & Digital Dads: A Fact-Not-Fear Approach to Parenting in the Digital Age will be published in Fall 2015. 

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