Mothers Against Facebook
There is no doubt that Facebook has become an influential part of many people’s lives today. Facebook, along with other social networking sites, are designed to help you connect with friends and relatives. They also give you the opportunity to stay updated on what’s happening on the web. However, not all the effects of Facebook are positive ones. In fact, now that more and more people are getting addicted to Facebook, the negatives effects of this site are also increasing. Read on to learn the serious negative effects of using Facebook.
You no longer experience social interaction.
Before Facebook and other social networking sites existed, there was a variety of ways to socialize with friends. You can have dinner or coffee, take up a sport together, try a hobby, go shopping, talk on the phone and a dozen other ways of spending time together. For a lot of people, all these methods have been replaced by chatting on Facebook, commenting on statuses or posting things on each other’s walls. Needless to say, these online methods lack the personal touch that face-to-face interaction has. Facebook addiction can be particularly negative for teenagers or young people since social interaction is necessary for their emotional development.
You develop an unhealthy lifestyle.
Another negative effect of Facebook is that it leads you to develop unhealthy habits. After all, spending hours and hours in Facebooking means sitting down in front of your computer and probably munching on a variety of junk food. As you already know, physical exercise and a healthy diet are necessary for good health. When you lead an inactive lifestyle with virtually no exercise, you develop the risk of suffering from obesity among other health disorders. Constant eating sweets and other junk food can also lead to diabetes and other serious diseases.
You lose quality time with your family.
Facebook can also cause you to lose precious bonding time with your family. As you know, today’s fast-paced and hectic lifestyle already makes it hard for each family member to have quality time together. Parents have their jobs to attend to as well as numerous errands to run. Children have school, extracurricular activities and social commitments. When those rare occasions come and your entire family is not busy doing other things, make sure you take advantage of this and plan an enjoyable family activity instead. This is much better than planting virtual plants in Facebook or answering a dozen quizzes.
You miss out on more worthwhile activities.
Facebook can easily swallow up large chunks of your time if you let it. You might log into your account thinking that you will just unwind for no more than fifteen minutes. Before you know, two or three hours have gone by. And when you look back, you will realize that you could have spent these hours doing something more important, like finishing up that report for work or tidying your messy closet.
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At what point do we as parents start to take back controll? I have two teen girls and I’m worried. I have restricted their time to one hour per day(and that’s when they aren’t grounded from their electronics alltogether). They can walk to the nearest elementary school play area and get on the net via the guest account. What are the rest of you doing to limit the influence of facebook?
That’s the point, mother should provide alternative ways for their child to spend time in such an ordinary kids rather than wasting their time with facebook. Social networking can lead to many problems and we won’t let those problems take our kids life on the line. We should turn their life transform in such a natural ways to be in the land of the living not in social networking.
I remember when I was 10, I had coloring books, crayons, and an imagination but now 8 year old today had iPhones, iPad, Cellphones, Facebook, Twitter and Youtube. I just want teens to figure out those days that we don’t have those new generation stuff but still we managed to live our social life happy and contented.
Wow, great points! So far, facebook is our children’s present social communication outlet. It’s our duty to stay in touch with what our children and to see how they are doing on facebook, we have to provide guidance along the way, never let them take the risks, remember that it is a parent’s responsibility to discipline our children and show how to protect themselves. Thanks for this wonderful article, hoping that all mothers would have all the time for their kids.
Facebook is where all the teens are hanging out now. It’s their corner store. Parents cannot monitor all teens activities but educating them is the best start, we can’t protect them too long even we wanted to, they will be having their chance to explore what’s surrounds them. As for the start we should let them learn the implications of being on-line and on social network sites.Educate the teens!
Educating our kids as to risks on socializing online or offline should be a major part of parenting. Too much, today, we just shelter them from risks, increasing their knowledge about kids’ cyber culture especially with facebook so beneficial to them. We need to let our kids remember that cyberlife isn’t real life.
Mothers knows the best! There are so many negative effects which could potentially arise from a child perusing around on facebook such as connecting with the wrong types of people; seeing things they shouldn’t and it could possibly outweigh the positive effects which they say — educational benefit. There’s much more that teens gets on negative side rather on positive side. Teens should be taught how to use the internet especially the social media safely and responsibly.
Great post Sir! This is indeed a great article to share. Networking site are now dominated by teens and still growing in popularity, in a way parents knows their kids attitude since they were the one who are with them, for me, they could allow them to use social network but they have to set rules that when rules are not followed then maybe it the time privilege that had been given to them on using should be removed.
It doesn’t matter what we say hear until they start charging to use the stupid facebook, our kids will keep using it. I lost my daughter because of facebook and all the things that teens don’t want you to know. The kids now days knows how to block the parents from see the things that they post and message back and forward. I had my daughter pass word but she could tell everytime I got on her page to see what she was doing because I was worried about her, staying up late, always on the computer. etc. Once she found out it became a big issue for her and I. Then some of the pictures that these boys and girls are posting on facebook showing half of their bodies, them laying on the bed with the person that they think they might be in love with. Talking about sex and fighting. I wish something could be done about facebook and they shut the whole site down. But with no help from facebook our kids will not make it.
We banned our 15 year old 3 times now from Facebook. She has mild mental illnesses to begin with. Our problem with fb was that our daughter would bring the drama from school home with her every night and on the weekends. It was becoming unhealthy. The kids seem to need to be “up in each others $h!+” constantly! For our daughter….the fact that she sat and viewed how wonderful everybody else’s life seemed to be (from a virtual perspective) and viewed how great everybody else’s pictures were……just made her feel even worse about herself than usual–due to the mental illness. She would never admit it. Down with fb until you reach age 21.
Addictin to Facebook was the beginning of the end for my son. Online Facebook contact replaced human contacts. One of the most seductive aspects of the site is using the word “friends” for the people invited to join your page. Some immature young people may not know the difference between real friends and the “acquaintances” they interact with on Facebook.
Now my son is DEAD after getting into worse and worse habits of withdrawal and contacting negative people on FACEBOOK. And he was legally n adult, so I had no control.
Parents beware! I believe there definitely be an older age requirement for using FACEBOOK for one thing.
I do NOT think any child should be on Facebook. Who are they trying to reunite with?? Kids from Kindergarten?? It’s senseless and gives these kids access to pages that they should not have access to!! Most of them lie to get a page. I know 200+ friends of my son that are 12 that have pages. One girl has a picture of herself giving the finger as her profile picture!!! The language they use is reprehensible!!! The pages that they “like” are just as reprehensible!!
16 should be the age and it should be required to sign up with a driver’s license.
I will be sending letters about this to whomever I have to, to get these kids off FB. There is no reason for it.
Hi there! I’m currently writing a paper about the effects of social media on the youth… This is a small section of the paper.
According to McLuhan in his book, written in 1967, The Medium is the Message , he stated that media are “extensions” of our human senses, bodies and minds, a type of evolution. At the time the internet was a thing of only dreams or elaborate science fiction stories but his thinking holds true. This idea was restated in by Logan in Understanding New Media: Extending Marshall Mcluhan15 that McLuhan conception of media in 1967 in-fact umbrellas new media like the phone, computer and medias evolving from them, this would include the internet. Logan reexplains one of McLuhans key ideas with an example.
“Let us expand on this idea, with the example of speech and writing. Speech is an extension of the human psyche that translates our mental processes into sounds, which communicate our thoughts and intentions. The content of writing is speech, but writing also extends speech in both space and time by rendering into a portable and durable medium. But if writing is the extension of speech and speech the extension — namely, the extension of speech, which is the extension of thought. Even if we write out our thoughts directly rather than transcribing our speech we can clearly and distinctly hear them inside our head. – Robert K. Logan Understanding New Media: Extending Marshall Mcluhan – p. 389 – 2010
According McLuhan, media is among other things, an extension of are bodies. At a high level, we could compare the loss of connections to a type of social media like Facebook or other commutative media to the loss of ones voice or mouth. To the users of Facebook, the anxiety and frustration caused by the physical loss of once voice can be compared to the loss of connection to Facebook.
Although some people has seen the connection to some social medias as negative and compared it to an addiction to a drug.
A simple example of this could be seen as If someone where to tape your mouth shut with tape and you had to go about your day today to today life and work you would feel some type of anxiety.
To the heavy users of social media tools like Facebook, instant cut of connection t Facebook would give them a similar type of anxiety.
Saying that “You no longer experience social interaction” isn’t a fair statement. If you ask your kids have make friends they have on Facebook, I’m betting they have more then 100. We I was their age I don’t think I could be in contact with more then 15 friends at a time….
The social interaction is just reformed into a format that we don’t see as interaction…
How many parents have Facebook and are friends with their kids? My father is almost 70 and I’m Facebook friends with him… hahaha
Anyways.. Thats my two cents..
I suggest adding a “google+” button for the blog!
No complaints on this end, spimly a good piece.
I am also in the same boat. My kids are on Facebook all the time and I have been trying figure out how to get them off from Facebook. The videos on your site are awesome! Lots to read , lots to watch.
Great info. Thank you
best post so far. and how many adults would stop using it as well…thousands i am sure!!! i enjoy it, but i would*** N O T ****pay a monthly or yearly fee for it. i would prefer to meet someone for coffee or go walking. i have a 13 year old and he has already partaken in some ugly communication with girls. stipulation now is that if he is to continue having the privileges he enjoys, he is required to provide all passwords to all accounts, email, xbox live, etc. all of his communication streams through my smart phone so when i choose, i can take a peak. he is a child and will be treated as such until he can pay his own bills. currently his phone, ipod and xbox are removed from his person due to school grade concerns. i think we need to be parents and not our childrens friends. my mother was never my friend. she was mom and i respected that. im hoping my boys will do the same. they can hate me at times, but they know i love them and want what is best.
1-parental controls on the home computer 2-no phones or ipods in bedroom at night. 3-get all usernames and passwords on all accounts and add to your smart phone so that all her posts stream to your phone. make sure she knows you are doing this and what you expect. make her repeat your expectations or sign a sheet of consequences so that when she DOES break the rules (and she will) you can remind her on paper of her agreement. teenagers only hear about 5 percent of what we say and then cant remember 4% of that. having a written agreement helps you stick to the rules. and you HAVE to stick to the rules. don’t feel sorry for what you expect from them. we have to follow rules as adults and our kids need to know there are set consequences for bad behavior. don’t be afraid to take her devices and break them with a hammer in front of her. when she can prove she is responsible, make her work to make enough money for the replacement and give back small privileges one at a time. Get your school counselor involved if you need to. i did when my son wouldn’t do anything and got defiant. he was pulled out of class twice a week to talk to a neutral party who took the time to listen and it helped. do whatever it takes…her life depends on you!!!
That’s a clever answer to a trikcy question
Facebook has been devastating our daughter. Obviously people on this blog that have commented ‘pull the plug’ etc, don’t have children. Nobody can be with their teenager every second of every day – they have computers at school, at their friends house, on their phones, ipods, etc. It’s not only about them sitting at the family computer. We were just on holiday for five weeks and we noticed a dramatic improvement in our daughter – she wasn’t lying to us or sneaking around. The minute we got to a place with internet – she morphed into a Facebook zombie. And it’s not only the amount of time, but the content and the pop-ups that don’t discriminate re: ages. The only thing stopping me from deactivating her account fear that she will open another one under a false name (which happens all the time – FB never do any checks), and then we really won’t know what’s going on. We have come across a sight called Eye Guardian, and they can oversee a FB account, and notify you when there is suspect activity going on. We’ve signed up for a free trial to see if that helps at all. We don’t want to invade her privacy, but young people do not have the emotional maturity to take in what is presented to them on Facebook, and as a result they are being damaged.
just a note….here is what we have in place in our home right now and it certainly isn’t fail-proof….1- All passwords and usernames on EVERY account are parental knowledge and all communication streams through my smart phone. 2-no phone,ipod or ipad left in bedrooms at night. 3-each of the three kids has his own login for the computer and each has parental controls for his age range and time limits set. when your time is up, the computer shuts off and allows for the next kid to have his time on the computer. 4-at any moment, if a parent wants to see the device in a childs hand, the child must immediately hand it over for “review”. if the child hesitates, the device is taken away for some period of time…usually a month! We have had serious issues with Facebook and yes, kids can create other usernames and accounts, but we have sat down and said that if this happens and we find out, the social circle in which they live will cease to exist. we are not required to give our kids these devices. we are required to give them the tools by which to make the right decisions….fully knowing they will make mistakes. it is our place to correct and guide them……i have said many times to my boys that i will take their cell phone and through them out the window of my car blazing down the freeway or run it over in the driveway. i bought these phones and ipods and they are MINE…my kids just get the privilege of using them responsibly….if they cant, well they are again mine. Come on parents, we need to take back control. We are losing this generation…….
Hello,
I just discovered this site. Nice to have a forum to discuss the negativities of Facebook. Personally, I don’t have any children. So, first off, I imagine that it could be difficult to detour your pre-teen or teen the other way from this media outlet. However, parents are “above” the child, and are suppose to impose discipline and guidance. The real world is a bitch sometimes. Excuse my French! Sometimes, there can be a skewed line from what is and not permissive to talk about on Facebook. Relaying all your personal business from romantic relationships to your fights with mom on Facebook for all the 453 so-called “Friends” isn’t unlikely to bring positive forces in your life. You get all kinds of opinions on your life that is your sacred lock box, and if anything should be discussed about “your” life, it should be with one’s “close” friends and family. In this world of everyone’s business is your business, you still need to maintain your sacred lock box. For young people, that needs to be reinforced. What happened to privacy?! Good God!! We invite negativity into our lives, when we decide to invite strangers into our lives. Close friends are few, but believe me, it is well worth to have those close friends that you can converse with privately than those that are out looking with envious eyes and judgemental opinions. I am a big believer on positive and negative energies, and I have very good intuition about people. I would encourage parents to teach that “real” world mentality to their kids, so that they get somewhat of a grasp how dangerous it is to their self esteems, when they invite the world of their 453 “so-called” friends into their domain. So, in the best way possible, parents please protect your children. There is so much more they can amount to in this world than gossiping witches.
correction- isn’t “likely” to bring positive forces in your life-
If Facebook were to charge a fee, requiring a credit card it would most certainly be a start. How else would we be able to stop our children from using Facebook without permission? I’m seriously considering banning it in our household because it invades too much family time.
Could just pull the plug or remove the batteries so they cannot turn on the computer at all. Then keep it off until they lose the addiction.
Hey, that’s the geatrest! So with ll this brain power AWHFY?
let’s face it parents. How may of us are friends with our kids on facebook? How many of you have or had conversation about Facebook? Many of us just don’t think too much of it till some thing happens. Would we rather wait or take the precaution and Avoid Facebook.
I love reading your Avoid Facebook posts. I just wish i could be part of it and contribute. I will be back with my own post.
On a more serious note I really like what your community is doing. I think your community helping parents with their online social network concerns with their kids.
Mental and physical addictions are certainly not a taboo nowadays.
I’m astounded that Facebook has a legal age 13. There are so many users that they dont monitor the content that is published on users Walls. Only recently did I come across banter between 14yr olds. The content was very offensive, using derogatory terms, abusive language, sexual discrimination. You can report it but that doesn’t do anything. I think Facebook has got out of control and is getting worse. There are no limitations, no restrictions.. just what are we teaching children. Some parents aren’t even aware of what’s going on. The founder of Facebook surely sees there is a big dark hole in his creation. Not so long ago I read about a young mother that left her baby unattended in a bath to log into Facebook and that ended in a tragedy where a babys life was lost. Hearing and seeing bad things come off Facebook has made me anti FB.
I have to say i find this a bit odd, because my experience is the exact opposite
1. I spend most of my time working or at home with my family: Facebook enables me to interact on a daily basis with a lot of friends I wouldn’t speak to for weeks at a time otherwise.
1. I follow several health and fitness writers on Facebook, including the excellent Bodyrock.tv, which have hugely expanded the range of exercises I do, and keep me well informed around diet and nutrition
1. I don’t spend less time with my immediate family, and most of my Facebook time is taken from odd moments in the day, when I’m in a break at work, when staring into space trying to think where I’ll take a piece of writing, or during the time I used to spend watching TV (which was never much). My extended family I have far more contact with since we all got on Facebook.
1. The same can be said of anything we do: some things are more worthwhile than others, we all have to decide how we spend our time. At least now I’ve spent that time talking to people, instead of playing solitaire!
I think the mom talking about her kids. We adults can do what ever we please.
This is the dumbest crusade I have ever witnessed. What happened to personal accountability, parental control, and using the off button on the computer? Maybe if you crusaders had a life, and spent time with your kids, you would not need to partake in this stupid crusade! If your kids are not mature enough for social media, use a firewall to block access. If your kids don’t listen to you, then maybe it’s your parenting skills!
This is the only website which brings out the awareness about Facebook. Facebook is a Social Network. Social Network will have social issues and concerns. There is no way to avoid concerns, issues and worries among loved ones. “Avoid Facebook” website’s main purpose is to bring out all those awareness.
laughable response! Nothing combats social issues lake good parenting, and open communication with family. If not FB then they will use drugs, if not drugs they will get addicted to porn, if not porn Alcohol, if not alcohol XBOX, WII, Playstation. The list goes on and on! PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY, parental controls on the internet. Anyone with half a brain knows that FB is not a safe website, CNN, USATODAY, FOX new have all provided information concerning the utilization of FB.
Like you said “CNN, USATODAY, FOX News” have all provided information concerning the utilization of Facebook. Our website exists to protect our loved ones and children to make sure they know and practice safe surfing on online Social Network sites. Our goal is cover all concerns that arise from social network, including how addictive Facebook can be. For years to come.
Well done arcltie that. I’ll make sure to use it wisely.
Respectfully take your head out of the sand. Access to facebook is almost everywhere outside of the home. Your child could get access from a friends cell phone,even the library. Mature concerned parents know these things.
This site is called mothers against facebook for a reason. We are talking about children who may not have the discipline to not invite the wrong type of social interractions into their life. Mothers and fathers are there to help their children not to make some of the same stupid mistakes they’ve made. Before Facebook, at least we could try to come in and help to clean up the mess made. One wrong click or post and the damage is done forever. The word is forever. One could forget their dreams of becoming a senator,or public figure. Are we getting it yet? I hope so.
Youngsters reveal too much information about themselves on Facebook. They spend hours on Facebook and it has become a menace. They put up status messages announcing to the world what’s happening in their lives. In fact, just anyone can know about them through their Facebook account. I feel very worried as youngsters today are rebellious, and this has made things difficult for parents.
oops…that was “I would N O T pay monthly or yearly for Facebook”