Tech Enthusiast, Austin Agbakor, says kids who spend too much time on social media are more likely to be ineffective and perform poorly on assignments.
Agbakor noted that from his years of mentoring children, he observed that social media addiction affect their performance academically.
The Chief Executive Officer, of CVHUB4AFRICA, an Information Technology (IT) Company, stated this during an interview with News Agency of Nigeria in Lagos.
The tech enthusiast said, “Social media addiction is over overuse of your time on the internet, especially on social media platforms.
“However, there are different categories of addiction. Let me talk of basic addiction that’s those who before going to bed they are online and waking up they’re checking their phone, if you want to appropriate time, we should be talking about eight hours to nine hours daily.
“Let me say that social media addiction causes a lot of distractions, and may result in delayed learning.”
Agbakor stressed the importance of parental controls, in which parents set limits on their children’s screen time or have login access to their social media accounts.
“Personally, i won’t advise parents or teachers to cut video games out of a child’s life completely.
I believe with endpoints solutions and access control applications, you can easily grant or deny them access even browsing time and download bits. Just setting up boundaries will help your child find other activities interesting.
“You can limit the amount of time they play video games by setting protocols to stop video games or YouTube, some of this premium internet security anti-virus software programmes have that feature.,’’ he counselled.
The IT expert said the action-adventure games for kids also had its positive and negative impacts on children.”
“For example, my six year old son, who enjoys action-adventure games like UFC, Wrestling and Boxing started showing some of these traits even to the elder sisters, even though the age gap between him and them is seven years and 10 years.
“Sometimes, he wants to show violence then, I had to limit him access to these games.
“Well, like I mentioned earlier everything that has negatives can be very positive too, but the truth is that social media has come to stay as part of man’s life pattern and also core essential part of modern society.
“So, we have to learn how to live with it successfully,” the tech enthusiast said.