SimiSimi is the latest app to alarm parents, and make many feel once again ‘on the back foot’ when it comes to keeping young people safe online. Thankfully this app now appears to have gone offline in Ireland but this ‘feeling disempowered’ around parenting for social media use is not how it has to be for parents. We can all feel empowered to keep young people safe online, it is completely 100% possible to feel empowered. By following five easy steps, any parent can feel on top of this issue and no longer ‘on the back foot’. Social media and knowing how to parent effectively around it is new territory for this generation of parents but anyone can feel empowered in new territory, once you have knowledge about the new terrain.
SimiSimi
SimiSimi is an app that has been around for a number of years but in the last few weeks, it has become extremely popular and trendy in Ireland and many young people have been downloading it. It is an app that allows users (who should be over 16 years) to begin a conversation with a ‘chatbox’. The ‘chatbox’ is a computer programme that stimulates human conversations on the internet, the image on the app is colourful and appealing to young people, the concept of talking to a ‘robot’ is novel and new and so it holds appeal. How could parents have known about this app, it certainly isn’t something that most parents would have time or interest in, and yet there is an absolute necessity to know about the apps your child is using and wanting to download.
Even if they are not apps you are interested in yourself, it is good to check them out before allowing your child to get them, that is an expectation you can set right at the beginning of your child’s social media journey. The danger with SimiSimi is that a lot of what the chatbox gives out in terms of ‘conversation’ is offensive and hurtful. Young people are being cyber-bullied through the app because users of it can teach the chatbox responses and replies. This app has been used as an instrument to cyber-bully others. But there are other apps that can cause harm too, we need to know every app our children are having access too.
The importance of knowing what young people are having access to
A number of things come to mind when I hear stories about this app. One is the importance for parents of knowing every single app that their child is using, even if the child is not considered a ‘child’ and is in fact a teenager. Another thing that comes to mind is that this app became well known about among the parent and school population here because it quickly became apparent that large numbers of young people were downloading it all at once. Adults heard about it because it quickly become the ‘must-have’ app. But there are many dangerous apps out there that I know about because I hear young people talk about them. Parents need to know about them too and preferably way before the point in time that their child hears about it from peers.
There are very dangerous apps where young people, who pretend to be older than they are become at risk of grooming or exploitation. I wrote about them in my book because I want parents not to be alarmed, but rather I wish for parents to be empowered and for young people to be safe. We need to educate young people about the danger of pretending to be older than they are online. If they click a box that says they are eighteen when they are in fact only fifteen, they could be putting themself in danger. It is absolutely vital that parents take on board the fact that young people beginning on their social media journey are at a completely different stage of psychological development than us adults and so how a young person starting out on social media feels and behaves will link to where they are at psychologically, rather than where we as adults would be at, when we as adults engaged with social media for the first time.
During adolescence, young people are moving from being concrete thinkers to abstract thinkers. This means that a child of ten, eleven, twelve is only at the very beginning stage of that journey and so, no matter how often they are told that someone who may seem nice to them may actually mean them harm, they will take a more simplistic view as that is the level of cognitive sophistication they are at. We need to do more than warn children of danger, we need to remain cognisant of the effectiveness of being clear on the rules about accessing social media sites that are not appropriate for a child’s age. It is normal for young people to try push against boundaries, it is normal for them to want privacy but if this SimiSimi app teaches us anything, it teaches us that we need to be aware of what our children are engaging with online and downloading. It is part of what keeps them safe if we explain to them that this is how it will be right from the start.
How to help a child recover from hurt caused on SimiSimi
If a child has been exposed to harm on SimiSimi through hurtful or offensive comments being posted about them, one of the important things to focus on, as well as getting them away from that app, is to focus in with them on what the experience has made them feel, particularly about themself. Confidence links in a fundamental way to self –esteem and self-esteem links to mental well-being and so it is useful to check in with a young person to see if their confidence has taken a hit.
If it clearly has, one exercise that can help them regain their confidence is to fill in a confidence circle with them, drawing a circle and getting them to divide the circle into slices, the size of each slice representing a source of confidence for them self. It can happen that by doing this exercise, a young person can see that the hurtful, mean comments from someone else says more about that person who posted anonymously (they are acting in a mean/unkind way) rather than it really reflecting on them at the receiving end of the comments. By filling in their confidence circle, a young person can see that what that other person says does not have to influence their confidence; they can source confidence from inside themself.
There are lots of ways that parents can feel empowered to keep young people safe online and any parent can reach empowerment in five easy steps. There will be plenty more apps to set alarm bells ringing in our schools in times to come….. let’s get ahead of our children and know before they do about how to cope with any danger. Our children deserve for us to do nothing less.
Anne McCormack is the author of ‘Keeping Your Child Safe on Social Media: Five Easy Steps’ which is available in bookshops nationwide throughout Ireland. Anne will host a pop-up event for parents on Keeping Your Child Safe Online in Eason’s, Cavan, on Saturday 22nd April. All are welcome to attend.