<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" Gaming You might think that your children are innocently building a city on Minecraft, trying to keep their Moshi Monster well fed or scoring a goal for their team in FiFA 16. They are doing these things, but all these games have the facility to allow players to connect with other players, these can be their friends or total strangers. Gaming is often primary-school-age children&amp;#039;s first introduction to social media. It&amp;#039;s important that you keep a close eye on what games they are joining\u00A0and apply parental and privacy controls to stop in-game purchases and ensure that strangers can&amp;#039;t make contact via the games. If these can&amp;#039;t be applied, the games should be deleted.   Instagram Instagram is a photo-sharing chat site\u00A0that lets you show off photos you&amp;#039;ve taken. You can limit who sees your photos to friends or turn off the privacy settings and let the whole world see what you&amp;#039;re doing. Thirteen\u00A0is \u00A0the minimum age for users. Instagram doesn&amp;#039;t ask users for their age, however, so many much younger children use it, often with their parent&amp;#039;s consent. Even with strict privacy controls, kids can get hurt by this app. In a bid to maximise their Instagram friendship group they will probably accept their best friend&amp;#039;s cousin&amp;#039;s friends as friends. These people could be older than them and post content that is not appropriate for them to see. It&amp;#039;s vital that you make your children aware of these risks and the importance of not posting potentially hurtful photos or comments themselves. Start your own Instagram account to keep track of what they are doing and ask to see their Instagram stream regularly\u00A0to check it&amp;#039;s all innocent.\u00A0   Snapchat Snapchat is a photo-sharing app similar to Instagram, but photos disappear a few seconds after they&amp;#039;ve been seen, so you don&amp;#039;t have to worry about your pic coming back to haunt you when you&amp;#039;re older and wiser. Viewers could still grab a quick screenshot, however, so you need to reinforce the need to never post anything potentially hurtful or offensive and to tell your child to tell you if anyone posts or says anything nasty about them so that steps can be taken to ensure this doesn&amp;#039;t reoccur. The age limit is 13, but again there are no checks on this, so lots of younger kids use it.\u00A0   YouTube You might have thought that YouTube was just a facility for viewing videos on the web and have set privacy controls to ensure your children don&amp;#039;t watch anything inappropriate on it. Your kids can also create their very own channels, however,\u00A0and post their own videos online. If they do this,\u00A0you need to ensure that they know to only post appropriate videos, that their channel is kept private and that you keep an eye on who is commenting. Anything inappropriate should be bought to the attention of YouTube and you should explain to your child why the comment is wrong.   For more advice on keeping your children safe online visit Parentzone. More on prima.co.uk... 9 things your children learn at primary school Talk to your teen about anxiety and depression Get your fix of all things Prima with our twice-weekly newsletter \u2014 sign up below!  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.prima.co.uk/family/teenagers/a35617/understand-the-social-media-your-teens-are-using/>