How to support your child through the social media ban – listen, be on their side and don’t try to justify the new rules

The social media ban will create a hole in many young lives but parents can help navigate the shift emotionally and practically, experts say. Photograph: imageBroker.com/Alamy

As if parenting children and teenagers isn’t complex enough, the monumental rise of social media has presented this generation of parents with a new raft of challenges. They must reckon with restricting, delaying or understanding their children’s use of a technology that they themselves did not grow up with. And so as many as two-thirds of parents, surveyed earlier this year, welcome the upcoming social media ban for children under 16. But it could create a new set of complications.

“We’re getting kids off their very entrenched routines, so that in itself is a huge challenge,” says Dr Jo Orlando, the author of Generation Connected: How to parent in a digital world.