New resources: Pre-teen social media use

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.