TikTok Challenges and Your Child’s Safety: Everything You Should Know
In the growing age of technology, children now have access to multiple apps and entertainment options. They are open to numerous fast, convenient, interactive, and dangerous platforms. If you are a concerned parent, you must know about TikTok – a short-form content-sharing platform. With its launch, the app faced numerous lashes due to issues like user data privacy, poor content ratings, and more. Despite everything, it became a trend and brought the masses and children into a whirlpool of trends, TikTok challenges, hashtags, and more.
Are you concerned about your child’s TikTok activities? If yes, that’s good, but if not, then you should be.
TikTok for children is not as simple as it sounds. The platform has millions of users with billions of videos that are increasing daily. Your child can access and consume all of these videos if left unattended.
Adopt Content Screening for TikTok
When the content on TikTok is the issue, you have access to TikTok Parental Controls that help you restrict and screen the TikTok feed.
Undoubtedly, the platform improved its parental control features in the app to secure minors from inappropriate content. You can use these controls to put things on pause.
Additionally, try out TikTok Monitoring by FamilyTime app to know what content your child accesses on TikTok.
What’s your take on “TikTok Challenges”?
Mature content is not the only problem with TikTok. In recent years, many parents reported TikTok challenges as a red flag for their children. These challenges triggered their children to perform some dangerous acts putting their life at risk.
What is a TikTok Challenge? Back in 2020, when the world got shut down due to the pandemic, people found social media as a source to connect. Most content creators on TikTok rolled out the term TikTok Challenge, encouraging users to interact with their content.
Initially, these challenges were about acts, dances, pranks, and more. However, these lighter note acts gradually moved from a simple recreational trend to crazy and dangerous stuff. To be out of the box, people brought TikTok Challenge ideas that ended up as threats.
Here are some TikTok challenges with some adverse outcomes:
- Skull Breaker Challenge
- Coronavirus Challenge
- Full Face Wax Challenge
- The Corncob Challenge
- Vampire Fang Challenge
- Tossing coins into Electric Outlet Challenge
These are just a few of the drastic challenges that have been trending on TikTok, resulting in many deaths, injuries, and other outcomes.
How TikTok Challenges Reach Your Child?
Well, if your child is just scrolling the videos on TikTok, why are TikTok Challenges a threat to you? It’s not that simple.
TikTok is a social media app that connects your children with some real and online friends too. When using TikTok, they interact with other people, enabling the algorithm to connect with more people of the same interest or slide relevant content to their feed.
So, two sources that expose your child to challenges are:
- The feed – The trending video showing on the feed
- The peers – The videos by peers who performed the challenge
Viewing the challenges repeatedly influence your child to perform them and be in the limelight. The world of social media is intriguing and excites children to stand out and gain fame. Following the urge to become popular or praised, children attempt challenges on TikTok. We cannot ignore that challenge videos on TikTok are the most viewed, liked, and shared.
Additionally, the fear of missing out triggers many children to try these challenges and get into the mainstream of the TikTok world.
FOMO and, being popular, getting more likes is one of the significant reasons your child is triggered to perform challenges without considering the outcomes.
Step Up to Save Your Children
Knowing that your children are using TikTok is enough to make you worry, but you cannot keep them away from the platform. However, saving them by stepping up as an active participant is possible. You have two ways to do it:
- Connect with their social media world
- Act to keep them safe on TikTok
Remember, cutting off TikTok will never help; it will trigger your children to use the app aggressively. Instead, you can limit usage time on TikTok and make some smart moves.
Tips to Connect with Your Child’s TikTok World
Letting technology pull you apart from your child is not a good idea. Even if you are uncomfortable with social media apps or platforms like TikTok, you must step out of your comfort zone for your child. Here are some tips for doing it.
Join the Community
Be part of the TikTok community. Make your account and start exploring it. Understanding the platform is essential for you as a parent. Explore the tools, content, top trends, influencers, and Parental Controls.
Talk About Challenges or Different Features
Open a conversation with your child about what’s hot on TikTok. Let your child discuss what he or she thinks about the platform’s challenges, trends, and content. You could learn about your child’s next step, content creation, and consumption preferences. It will help you condition them accordingly.
Use TikTok’s Built-in Parental Controls
TikTok Parental controls are not just for content filters but to save your child from random trends or TikTok challenges. Use the Family Pairing feature to hide your child’s profile from discovery, block TikTok LIVE, and even limit screen time for children.
Helping your Child to be Safe on TikTok
Once you are connected with your child about TikTok, it’s time to help him/her to be safe. You should keep in mind the triggers lead them to participate in challenges. Use the smart parental controls and your presence to help them best.
Enable them to understand and fight peer pressure.
Peer pressure may not be an issue for some adults, but it’s a big thing for kids. They are in the process of proving themselves to their peers. They may be disturbed, discouraged, and devastated if they cannot stand out or match others’ standards.
Talk to your children and tell them about the expertise and qualities that make them the best. They do not have to follow others blindly and end up in trouble.
Let them have a strong verdict about viral challenges and decide by themselves whether they should do it.
Share TikTok Challenges that Have Gone Wrong
Showing your children some examples is good to convince them. Share the case studies of TikTok challenges that went wrong and caused many people to lose their lives, face injuries, and even trauma.
Teach them to Practice “Pause, Review, Reconcile & Post.”
When your child is using a fast platform like TikTok and even posting on it, enable them to practice some golden rules. Teach them the importance of pausing before posting any content, reviewing it, making corrections based on ethical grounds, and then posting.
As a parent, provide them with some fine lines about what is ethical or age appropriate for them and what is not.
Be friends with them to encourage them in their choices
A friendly bond with your children encourages them to speak up with you about their feelings, ideas, and actions. Let them follow you even with their feed, recordings, and shorts. Help them to tweak and even create content sometimes.
Make Yourself Available Always.
Remember, nobody else can be in that place when you are present for your child. Make yourself available for children whenever they want to discuss, ask or share something. Doing so will help you get close to them, but you will only know what they share. To have some secrets and insights, FamilyTime TikTok Monitoring helps you look closely at what your children are hiding.
Wrap Up!
TikTok is not as good as it looks, neither fishy as you may think. With moderation and proper monitoring, it’s a good platform for children to explore their interests, different communities, and more.
However, as a parent, it doubles up your responsibility to be there for your child and helps him/her to be sold online. By connecting with your child in the TikTok community and helping them to be safe there, you can protect them from deadly TikTok challenges.
