Social media is like sex - young people need education, not unrealistic bans
Dedicated classes for children and parents: There are some key steps schools can take to improve social media literacy among young people.
The complexity and size of the topic means specific classes should be dedicated to it.
If it is integrated into the content of other subjects such as English or maths, it can easily get lost or be forgotten.
These classes should begin around the later primary school years, when most children are just about to get a phone.
Their use of technology really changes around this period, and we need to train them up in social media literacy before they establish behaviours that will follow them into adulthood.
Alongside these classes for children, schools can also run social media literacy classes for parents, who often feel completely overwhelmed and disempowered when it comes to helping their children navigate social media.
Many schools already offer cyber safety talks for parents once a year.
However, the content is quite repetitive and focused on the dangers of the internet.
This is unhelpful for parents as well.
When I speak to them, they tell me they often walk away from these classes feeling like the problem is too hard to fix.
Better educating parents about social media literacy and the positive uses of social media will help them help their children.
Social media and the way we use it has many layers and therefore this education for parents needs to be informed by specialists from these many layers such as data scientists, sociologists, marketers, videographers and human behaviour researchers.
But schools cannot do this important work alone.
If the government really wants to do everything it can to keep kids safe online, it needs to do more than just ban them from social media.
It needs to help develop and fund better social media literacy programmes.
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