Suggestions on How to Limit Social Media

[victoriousmama]

Parents, what are some ways that have worked to keep your adult child (mine is 18) away from social media? It is causing problems both for content that she is seeing (people posting mean stuff about her) but also for us because she disassociates and also posts stuff or sends emails/texts to people that we then have to deal with when they respond and threaten to involve the police because they think her condition is just an excuse for her behaviour.

It does not seem practical to take away her phone/laptop altogether in an attempt to keep her away from it. We still need to communicate with her on her phone and she uses her laptop for her art business that she's doing.

NOTE: She does sometimes give us her devices when she knows she's having an episode or is really low and will not ask for them back for awhile. But that is also frustrating because of the previous paragraph where she does need to communicate with us and the world (to an extent).

Our objective is to better understand the struggles our child faces and to learn the skills to improve our relationship and provide a supportive environment and also improve on our own emotional responses, attitudes and effectiveness as a family leaders

[kells76]

Sounds like she has some degree of self-awareness about the interplay of social media and her episodes, which gives you a bit of a doorway in. That's good.

Do you guys pay for her phone?

For phone issues, I wonder if you can switch her to a "senior citizen flip phone". My understanding is you can call, text, and take/send photos, but that's it -- no internet/data. Might be worth looking into.

Laptop-wise, yeah, makes sense that she needs it for work. But she doesn't work 24/7, right? Can you get some common ground with her via agreeing together "hey, for work reasons, let's make sure you get a break from work between 9pm and 7am, so let's have the laptop stay in the kitchen then, you deserve time off". Something to keep the internet out of her bedroom when she's alone. IDK how to phrase it, you might have a better sense of what wording would be effective with her, but something where there isn't blame/shame around "why can't you just stay off of social media" and more "you're doing amazing with work, let's make sure you don't overwork yourself".

Some days I wish there would be an electromagnetic pulse that takes out the internet. Except for this group, of course.

[victoriousmama]

I agree about the electromagnetic pulse!

Yes you've made good observations about not needing it 24/7. We've been quite "strict" about use of phone/laptop in our house. The rule has been no devices in your bedrooms until you turn 18 and phones got handed in at 7pm and laptops as soon as you finished homework (though "home work" often dragged on and on). She was excited to turn 18 and have more privileges but we've had conversations with her that she needs to be more stable to keep her phone etc all the time.

So in the country where we live, you buy bundles of credit to load on the phone as opposed to paying a set monthly fee. For example, we buy her a bundle for about $10 that gives a certain amount of GBs data plus number of texts and phone calls. It lasts for a whole month because she uses wifi most of the time.

I've also considered putting an app lock on all apps so she can only access her anxiety games, phone calls and texts but not go online directly. Problem is those apps tend to be pretty easy to get around - you can even just uninstall them without needing the password to do so.

Do you ever just get tired? It's tiring work having to constantly come up with solutions and manage the current crisis.

[Aralia]

I sympathize, no empathathize, about the devices and social media and internet in general. I have in the past hidden my daughter's laptop and sometimes even the router so there is no internet in the house (but then I have to take the phones too). What strikes me about your post is that your daughter is suffering too and so maybe in a quiet moment when she is calm you can talk to her and ask her what she thinks might work. If she isn't on board it probably won't work in the long term anyway.