Mediatrician Gives Tips on Teaching Tweets to Tweens

In the fast-paced media landscape of social networking and smartphones, parents may feel left behind and unable to keep up or monitor their kids. Brookline parents learned tools and tips at “,” held at Brookline .

About 60 parents heard experts speak about the impact that all media, not just social, has on children. The event, presented by Brookline Community Mental Health Center (BCMHC), is part of the Sher Parent Educational Series, founded by Brookline parent Rachel Sher.

“As parents, we’re navigating uncharted waters with social media,” Sher said. “Let’s face it, none of us grew up with social media…Our kids are learning differently and their brains are growing differently than ours did.”

Rachel Feller, a clinical therapist at BCMHC, spoke about the effect that social media, particularly Facebook, has on children’s lives, for better and for worse. Some topics include self-esteem, relationships, bullying and peer pressure.

“The kids I work with talk a lot about Facebook, especially when they first start,” Feller said. “I talked for an hour with one client about how she thought her picture looked. The comparison is too easy.”

Online predators also still present a risk. Feller pointed out how simple it is to pretend to be someone else on Facebook, citing 564 profiles for the popular tween singer Justin Bieber, with 74 claiming to be the “real” Bieber.

“It’s so easy to get a page,” Feller said. “All you need is an email. It’s something definitely worth talking about with your kids.”

Dr. Michael Rich, also known as “The Mediatrician,” is director of the Center on Media and Child Health at Children’s Hospital Boston and Associate Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. Rich spoke for over an hour, covering all media and citing studies in order to inform parents of the extent that all media – television, cell phones, music and print – have pervaded into children’s lives.

“We are trying to replace the heat of controversy with the light of evidence,” Rich said. “Data is used to regulate what we eat and what we drive. Let’s take the same approach with media.”

For example, according to Rich, children ages 8-18 spend 7.5 hours a day using media. And because the original study was conducted in 1999, the figure does not include cell phones, which brings the number to 10 hours a day. This exposure has changed the way kids acquire and use information.

“At the library, kids used to learn how to look up a book,” Rich said. “Now, they teach kids how to filter out extraneous information, because it’s being thrown at them all the time.”

So what should parents do about this influx? Rich answered questions from the audience, including how to react when a child sings inappropriate song lyrics from the radio and when a son or daughter asks for a cell phone or Facebook page “because everyone else has one.”

“My eleven-year-old is sitting in the backseat, singing, ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones but chains and whips excite me,’” said one parent, referring to a song by Rihanna. “What do I do?”

Rich recommends engaging kids about lyrics and asking your child the real reason for wanting a Facebook profile or cell phone. He also advises to keep the charger in the parents’ bedroom to regulate usage and make sure the child has a proper night’s sleep.

“This [cell phone] is a tool, like a saw or hammer,” Rich said. “It’s not an inalienable right from the U.S. Constitution and you’re not genetically predisposed to work a cell phone.”

Another tip is engage children in their own interests and allow them to teach the parent, in order to show that the parent is not a police or checked out of their lives.

“Listen to their music, play their games, but prepare to be utterly humiliated,” Rich said. “They’re the master, we’re the neophyte.”

And while it may make a catchy event title, Rich added that tweens are not generally on Twitter.