Parenting Daughters in the Age of Social Media

Co-written with Dr. Aimee Miller-Ott, Illinois State University.

A parent discussing challenges of decision-making over her children’s social media use expressed, “I will say, hands down, that one of the things I struggle with the most is…a few of my kids have found friends that have no boundaries on their phones. Whether it’s downtime or time limits, it baffles my brain… it’s really sad to me and definitely makes it harder.”

Challenges for Parents Over Social Media Use

A 2020 Pew study showed that 70% of U.S. parents believe parenting is more difficult than two decades ago. Managing children’s technology and social media use were the top challenges identified (Auxier et al., 2020). Parents must figure out whether to allow—and how to guide—their children’s social media use.

A 2023 Common Sense Media study indicated that 43% of children between the ages of 8 and 12, and up to 95% of teens, have their own smartphone, with usage ranging from a few minutes to 16 hours per day. They reported that teens received an average of 237 notifications per day (with some as high as 4500 a day), and they engaged with about 25% of the notifications received. The full report is worth reading to get a sense of the amount and impact of information reaching teens and how they deal with what is coming in and going out.

I am co-authoring this blog with Communication Studies scholar Dr. Aimee Miller-Ott of Illinois State University. Aimee knows from her research and her own life as a parent that many parents feel overwhelmed supervising their children’s social media use.

Parents find they need to:

• Understand the different social media platforms, which change rapidly
• Have open communication with children about social media
• Help children learn critical thinking and how to keep safe online
• Instill appropriate and workable rules and guidelines for children’s social media use
• Give children some freedom to make their own choices

Parents of girls face some unique challenges, especially given daughters’ reliance on social media for information and comparisons about their popularity, beauty, style, and overall self-worth (Fardouly et al., 2020). Parents are particularly concerned about what their daughters reveal about themselves online. In 2021, the Wall Street Journal published an exposé finding that social media contributes to girls feeling bad about their bodies, anxiety, and depression.

Parenting Daughters’ Social Media Use

In a recent study, Aimee Miller-Ott and her colleagues interviewed parents of daughters 12-18 years old about their own expectations and decision-making over daughters’ social media use. Interestingly the researchers learned that not all parents thought they needed to spend much time thinking about daughters’ social media use or talking with daughters about it.

However, most parents do take their daughters’ social media use seriously and have a lot to say about their own struggles as parents. These parents worked hard to figure out what they thought a good parent versus a bad parent would do, asking questions such as how much should they monitor their daughters’ social media use. Should parents check daughters’ profiles and accounts? How can parents give daughters some freedom but still oversee and, when needed, restrict their usage? What happens if parents give their daughters too much autonomy on social media? What should a parent do when other parents are giving their daughters more freedom than a parent wants to give their own children?

The researchers’ findings included:

• Parents struggle to make sense of what a good parent should do regarding their young daughter joining and using social media.
• Parents view constant monitoring of daughters’ social media as exhausting and unrealistic.
• Parents believe they should engage in two-way ongoing conversations with daughters about social media to establish trust and set workable expectations.
• Parents often use daughters’ positive traits and behaviors (trustworthy, good student, responsible) to justify not engaging in excessive monitoring.
• Parents experience tensions between shielding daughters and providing independence and privacy to navigate social media themselves.
• Parents often desire to enable daughters to make their own decisions about social media while protecting them from potential harm.
• Parents should focus on their own unique knowledge of, and experiences with, a daughter when deciding how to oversee social media use.
• Parents are best served to limit their comparisons to the choices of other parents.

One parent explained, “You can’t control everything, but you can keep your eye open and see the comments, the messaging. You just have to—it’s such a scary platform as much as it is good.”

Advice for Parents

Common Sense Media (2023) stresses: “We do kids and their digital well-being a disservice by being overly negative and prescriptive, since this will likely only shut down conversations and make young people feel that they cannot come to us when they experience phone-related challenges—which most do, at one time or another.” It is important to encourage open communication so kids will not start hiding social media use out of fear that parents will overreact or take away their phones.

Parenting Essential Reads

Putting the Kids in Charge

Parents and Smartphones: A Healthy Mix?

With this in mind, we offer parents the following advice:

1) Talk to your partner, if you have one, and your daughter to determine when you think she’s ready to join social media.

2) Consider the following questions:

• What role do you want to play in your daughter’s social media use?
• How much do you want to oversee her social media use?
• When and how do you want access to your daughter’s accounts, passwords, etc.?
• Do you expect to be a friend or follower on a daughter’s social media accounts?
• What rules, if any, do you want to create to guide a daughter’s social media use?
• How much time will a daughter be allowed to use social media each day, and how will parents monitor this?
• What will the ramifications be when daughters overuse or misuse social media?
• How will parents keep current with social media changes and their daughter’s maturing?

3) Consider easing daughters into social media use, rather than going all in all at once.

Young women will undoubtedly have friends with no restrictions or boundaries on social media use. It will be important to do what is best for the young people in your life, based on your relationship and past experiences with their choices. Parents will need to keep up to date on communication technologies and update their own expectations as changes develop and daughters mature.