Three in every four parents with children under 18 use social media to interact with other parents, most often by responding to good news, Pew found. Cultivating these online friendships builds a support network that can be tapped when things aren’t so happy, giving frustrated parents a place to turn for creative tips to get their kid to eat some peas.
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Seventy-nine percent of parents who use social media have found useful information on the social network with more than half finding useful parenting advice.
“As more social networking sites recognize and adapt to their role in the news environment, each will offer unique features for news users, and these features may foster shifts in news use”, Pew noted.
While 91 percent of parents use the Internet, 75 percent of them use social media.
It seems that parents are doing more than just sharing their latest baby pictures on Facebook as well.
42 percent of parents who use social media have received social and emotional support about parenting issues from their online networks-50 percent of mothers, compared with 28 percent of fathers.
Despite red flags that are raised about posting too much online, only 12 percent of all parents say they have felt uncomfortable when information is shared about their child on social media. There’s also considerable overlap among users of both sites, which means that 8 percent of US adults now use both Facebook and Twitter to get news.
Moms are more likely than dads to seek support on social media, the study says. Pew also found that attempts to evade parents online aren’t working out very well, with 65 percent of parents aged 40 and older reporting that they are Facebook friends with their children.
Only 11% of parents had ever asked someone to take down something that had been posted about their child, the survey round. Those figures are up considerably from Pew’s last survey in 2013, when 52 percent of Twitter users and 47 percent of Facebook users said they turned to those sites for news.
Before the arrival of the digital and social media revolution traditional mediums (radio, broadcast, newspapers) dominated the landscape for getting the news. The typical parent has a network of 150 Facebook friends. Furthermore, they actually do check it more than once a day.
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That aligns with trends on how prevalent social media use is between women and men, Duggan said. Not only are parents reading content on the social media networks, but most are also sharing content there as well. Among all USA adults, two-thirds use at least one social media platform, such as Facebook, which was the most popular platform, as well as Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn or Pinterest.
