When you surround yourself with positivity, you feel inspired and empowered to chase after your dreams.
A positive environment brings happiness to your life because you are not dealing with any energy that can alter your mood and self-esteem. You essentially rid yourself of any negative thoughts that can bring you down.
As parents, we tend to pay more attention to our daughters’ physical environment. We worry about what school they will go to, how their teachers and peers treat them, and if they are exposed to a curriculum that will educate them and set them up for success.
But what about the virtual environment? Moms, have you paid attention to their social media recently?
You may not have realized it, but social media can negatively affect our daughter’s self-esteem and confidence.
Unfortunately, 1 in 2 girls says toxic beauty advice on social media causes low self-esteem. This can be shocking, but if you think about it, social media can be a very hostile environment with influencers constantly portraying the idea of perfection and giving unrealistic beauty advice.
We need to help make our daughter’s social media a positive place. With the Dove Self-Esteem Project, you will find tools to help your daughter maneuver through the effects of social media on her self-esteem.
Here’s how you can help her get started.
Regularly Check Privacy Settings
Allowing your daughter to have her profile set to the public enables room for strangers to come onto her profile and comment on anything they want. Have her profile set to private so only her friends and family follow her.
Now, it is essential to regularly check her privacy settings anyway because she can still approve friend requests, and updates on these apps can change how things are done.
Only those who care about her and her successes will make her social media a positive place.
Teach Her To Post Content That Makes Her Happy
Every day there seems to be a new trend pop up online. It can be easy to get lost in what everyone else is doing. This creates the pressure to create trending content but may not be something that speaks to your daughter. Maybe she doesn’t like to dance but feels she’ll get validation if she posts videos dancing to these trending audios.
Encourage your daughter to post content that makes her happy. Eliminate the mentality that she should only share things for likes and validation. Social media should be a place filled with things that bring her joy.
Unfollow Triggering Accounts
There can be certain content that can be upsetting for our daughters. She may have had a negative experience growing up that she is still coping with. This is when she should unfollow or mute these pages that constantly remind her of this.
Remind her that she does not need to follow pages that make her feel bad. Help her find and follow pages that bring her happiness.
It is our duty to educate our daughters on how to create a positive environment on the platforms she considers an outlet and reinforces that they should not contain things that make her feel less than beautiful.