My teenage daughter has found a new way to waste tons of time: the phone app Tik Tok. For the uninitiated, Tik Tok is a platform for posting short videos of yourself usually singing, dancing, or performing in some way. According to my daughter, it’s supposed to be the antidote to the glammed up versions of ourselves we’ve been posting on Instagram. (When I say ourselves, I mean the youngsters!)
On Tik Tok, you see, you can be silly and unpolished. Getting laughs is pretty much the point. Lately, the craze seems to involve posting intricate dance moves and having others compete with their own Tik Tok posts replicating the same dance. The whole thing seems terribly pointless, and the expenditures of time on the site are ridiculously wasteful.
Let’s face it. If you feel the need to post pictures or videos of yourself on social media, you are looking for attention and approval. It matters not whether the image is an airbrushed ideal you are trying to portray or a “Hey, I’m just a regular girl/guy” persona.
My daughter is the youngest of four children, and I am grateful that my three older kids grew up largely before the influence of social media. It has been a struggle to rein in my daughter’s addiction to her screen and insist that she get homework done, rest, and interact with her own family from time to time. I can’t imagine if I had had to deal with crazes such as Tik Tok four times!
I recall the advent of social online presences when my oldest child got AOL Instant Messenger on the computer. She would simultaneously complete her homework and chat with friends. Once my husband and I discovered an “away message” on AIM that included a mild expletive. We grounded her from the computer for a month!
In the good old days, I could also monitor what my kids were listening to music-wise. They were only allowed to download radio versions of songs that removed all the bad language. And although they did have iPods and could ostensibly get around that rule, they largely listened to their music in ways that I could hear.
I don’t envy younger parents. A tech-saturated world is only going to get more advanced. Soon parents will be grappling with teens having virtually reality sex and killing off their enemies in not-so-innocent VR games. I guess I should be happy for the relative innocence of Tik Tok.
Still, I think the clock needs to run out on Tik Tok. I still have to get my daughter through her senior year!
Because I Said So 