Why Are Kids Leaving Facebook?

Why Are Kids Leaving Facebook? Whether you know it or not, Facebook is losing its appeal with teens. Just as parents start to understand what Facebook is all about, and create a profile of their own to keep an eye on their children’s activities, children have decided that it’s no longer cool to be on a social networking site where your parents hangout.

While it is not uncommon for teens to have multiple Facebook profiles, the novelty of using a social networking site to chat to their friends, and know their parents are on the same site, is now wearing thin.

Children are now moving to Twitter and Tumblr as their number one choice for communicating with each other.

Twitter is an online social networking service and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based messages of up to 140 characters, known as “tweets”.

Twitter allows for users to be anonymous and it is easy to create multiple accounts. Not only that, teens will often use their own ‘text speak’ in their tweets making it more difficult for parents to understand what they are saying.

Tumblr, stylized as tumblr., is a microblogging platform and social networking website that allows users to post multimedia and other content to a short-form blog, named a “tumblelog”. Users can follow other users’ blogs, as well as make their blogs private. Much of the website’s features are accessed from the “dashboard” interface, where the option to post content and posts of followed blogs appear.

Tumblr has caught the attention of many schools over the past couple of years due to bullying issues. Emotionally charged teens often vent their feelings of anger and frustration very quickly without giving what they are saying a second thought.

Too often, what may have started out as a simple online conversation could easily escalate into a full on verbal assault on an online victim. The term flaming is described as the act of posting deliberately hostile messages on the Internet.

So what is the answer, Parents may ask. We recommend installing monitoring software to keep track of where your children are going to online. Ask them where they like to go to when using the internet. Discuss cyberbullying with them. Talk about the sites online where cyberbullying takes place.

Help children to understand the effects of cyberbullying, and how it affects a person that is being bullied. Many children do not understand the pain they inflict on the victim, so building empathy with your kids goes a long way!