My 9-Year-Old Is Obsessed With a Meaningless Metric. It Has the Power to Ruin Her Day.

Care and Feeding Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Andrii Iemelyanenko/Getty Images Plus. Care and Feeding is Slate’s parenting advice column. Have a question for Care and Feeding? Submit it here. Dear Care and Feeding, My 9-year-old daughter has become obsessed with her social media accounts to the point where her entire sense of self-worth is tied to how many likes she gets for her posts. If she doesn’t get as many likes as she thinks she deserves, she is in an absolute black mood for the rest of the day. How do I convince her that the world isn’t ending because she didn’t get the equivalent of a standing ovation for posting what she had for breakfast? —There’s Life Beyond Your Phone Dear There’s Life Beyond Your Phone, Your 9-year-old isn’t capable of regulating her internet/social media time; that is your job. It will be years before she has the maturity and impulse control to manage it herself. Every like and positive comment gives her a little dopamine hit—of course she’s cranky without that feedback. If I were you, though, I’d be even more concerned about the fact that social media use among girls her age is consistently linked to mental health struggles, disordered eating, and low self-esteem. With younger teens, there are smaller steps you can take, from limiting their phone usage to setting time limits for various apps. (Family settings on an iPhone will allow you to set some limits in place.) Kids also shouldn’t have public social media accounts—at least until they’re in their late teens, their accounts should be private to friends and approved followers only. But in your daughter’s case, mitigation and limits are not enough—what she needs is a parental ban. Most apps, including Instagram, have an age requirement of 13 or 14. A 9-year-old shouldn’t be on social media at all. You need to delete those apps from your child’s phone, encourage her to find some new pastimes that don’t involve sharing her life on the internet, and make sure she has opportunities to hang out with real friends in real time/in person. Please keep questions short (<150 words), and don‘t submit the same question to multiple columns. We are unable to edit or remove questions after publication. Use pseudonyms to maintain anonymity. Your submission may be used in other Slate advice columns and may be edited for publication. Dear Care and Feeding, My wife, “Rita,” is upset about a perfectly normal childhood activity. We order a lot of stuff, and our 3-year-old son “Chandler” loves playing in the boxes. Rita becomes furious every time I allow him to do this, because she thinks they’re filthy. I loved playing in boxes when I was little and so did my brothers and cousins when they were young. What can I do to convince her they’re just boxes and not toxic waste? —Box Battle Dear Box Battle, A big box plus a kid’s imagination is a classic, and always will be. Boxes become forts, castles, rocket ships, time machines—it’s tough to imagine a more wholesome or creative playtime activity for kids. And it involves zero screens and costs you nothing! As long as the box is clean and dry and your kid doesn’t like to gnaw on the cardboard, you’re fine. If it makes your wife feel better, you can let the boxes sit for 24 hours before your child ventures into them, and have him wash his hands after. —Nicole More Parenting Advice From Slate My 7-year-old daughter struggles to make friends, so I was very excited to hear that she had become friends with a girl, “Brenda,” at a summer camp. Brenda and my daughter have a lot in common—they both are shy, bookish girls; both very bright and very nerdy; both of them struggle to make friends normally; both of them have brown hair; they have the same favorite fruit (some of these sound very superficial but these things matter to aspiring 2nd graders!). For the past few weeks we’ve been setting up playdates for the two of them since the camp they attended together ended. We interacted with Brenda’s dad, as her mom was abroad for work. A few days ago, Brenda’s mom contacted us telling us that the playdates were over. We tried to message Brenda’s dad, but saw he’d blocked us. I think I know what happened… Never miss new Slate Advice columns Get the latest from Prudie and our columnists in your inbox each weekday, plus special bonus letters on Saturdays. Advice Family Kids