The pre-teen years are a time of rapid change, including how children are engaging in and using social media. Due to a range of factors such as higher technology and literacy skills, children in the pre-teen years are more independent online and can engage on a variety of different platforms in different ways. They might be creating, reacting to and/or sharing content and interacting with people (both known and unknown), and are often doing these things with little support or supervision from their parents.1 This highlights the importance of exploring social media use with children and their parents early on.2
Developed by the Parenting Research Centre, these resources explore social media use in pre-teens and strategies for practitioners when having discussions with pre-teens and their parents.
- Pre-teen social media use and the impact on mental health and wellbeing (practice paper)
- Pre-teen wellbeing and social media use: Practice tips (short article)
- Pre-teen social media use: Benefits and challenges for wellbeing (short article)
1 Rideout, V., Peebles, A., Mann, S., & Robb, M. B. (2022). Common sense census: Media use by tweens and teens, 2021. Common Sense.