Social media sites are full of rumors and accusations about what happened. Should I keep my child off the internet until things calm down?
When crises happen, there's a tremendous amount of information that comes flowing down the pipe via social media. If your child is old enough to be on a social media site without you overseeing their usage all the time, you definitely want to ask them what they're seeing, what they're hearing, and remind them that just because it's online or just because it's available to them through technology, doesn't necessarily mean it's true. This is a great opportunity to teach kids to be savvy media consumers and also to bring just a little bit of skepticism to it when they look at it. And then offer to help them fact check things, and make sure to remind them that you don't wanna get too excited until you get information from a reliable source.