Snapchat

We’ve all seen the news about the new Snapchat feature, and we have all seen the posts from concerned parents and statements released by the Police warning the public. I wanted to discuss this, being a parent myself I see no issue with the new feature, I don’t find it dangerous if used correctly and I have a few points as to why. I have Snapchat, although I rarely use it and upon exploring this new feature I noticed you can choose to either share your location privately, with friends or you can switch on “ghost mode” and hide your location from everyone. As a parent you have many jobs but one of the most important ones is to keep your child safe, so while I sympathize with the fear from my fellow parents I also find it slightly dramatic. If your child has Snapchat preventing this may be as simple as setting a rule that they have to hide their location, if they don’t abide by that I don’t see why they need a smart phone. Snapchat is an app where anyone you add can send you messages of all kids of anything that disappear within seconds, your child could meet a random man at a concert or at the mall and be receiving inappropriate photos from him and you would never know. Yet you allow them to use this app knowing this and your concern is their location being shared, which happens to be a feature that can be switched off. I find it hypocritical to be honest, and for a broader point, you can restrict your child’s phone from having the ability to download apps at all without a pass code.  So with all these features and all the abilities to control what your child does on their phone, and to keep your child safe and still the app is the issue? No, this comes down to a parenting issue, and quite frankly if they cant be trusted with a smart phone they don’t need one.