How to Help Your Teenager Manage Her Facebook Time

Dear Cyber Sorter,
My daughter is studying for her Leaving Certificate this year. She is mad into Facebook and I am concerned she spends more time on there than she does studying. It seems like a real distraction. I am on Facebook and I am friends with her on it so I know she’s logging on a lot. I considered limiting her computer time in favour of study time but she says she needs her computer to study, which is true.
How can I cut her Facebook time without causing a big teenage strop?
–CM

Dear CM,
You are right to fear negative effects. A recent survey by OnlineEducation.net found that students who “multi-tasked”, using Facebook in conjunction with studying, attained grades that were 20 per cent lower than those of their more focused peers.
The same has been said of television, but when a student is using a computer to study, it is more difficult to resist the temptation to log in and procrastinate.
There are positives from the same survey. Students who used Facebook felt more engaged with their school community than those who weren’t on the social network.
Fortunately, your daughter has not availed of several ways in which she could hide her Facebook usage from you. This shows openness and trust towards you. Resist the temptation to nag her or alienate her. Instead try to offer some coping mechanisms for dealing with her workload and upping her productive study time.
Suggest to her that the first thing she does on a study day is log into Facebook. She can spend up to half an hour catching up, reading through her news feed and responding to messages.
Then when the time is up she must log off. This removes the tab that whispers, “Open me. I’m far more fun than basic binary programming theory. Just for a little while. I promise you won’t spend long.”
It’s not a good idea to log back on during study breaks as it is likely to extend that break more than necessary. She is likely to benefit more from a walk away from her computer or a phone call with a friend.
It’s as easy to lose time on social media as it is to lose money in a casino. Telling her she is spending too much time on Facebook is likely to make her mentally plug her fingers in her ears and sing “la la la” until you stop.
There is an app that can help. Apps, such as 8aWeek, set up a toolbar on the browser where she can see how long she is spending on certain websites, such as Facebook. This app also allows her to set a timer on the site so she can restrict her usage.
As you are also on Facebook, she knows she can’t get away with saying it’s part of her study.
If you give her the tools, both software and psychological, to organise her time effectively, she is far more likely to thank you instead of defriending you, blocking you and starting a blog called “My Mammy Nags Me”. (Cyber Sorter regrets she is unable to guarantee prevention of teenage strops due to the inability to control other people’s hormones and brain development.)