Mr Patrick Brennan, Deputy Principal - Student & Staff Wellbeing
Online Group Chats
Unlike our time at school where conversations were either one-to-one in the playground or by a landline phone at home, our children now have a variety of group chat platforms at their disposal including Whatsapp, Instagram Messenger, Facebook Messenger, Facebook Messenger for Kids, and Discord. Users of these are getting younger and younger. For our adolescent children, group chats can be both helpful and harmful. Notifications ping all hours of the day, stacks of unread messages build up until they are not worth the effort to catch up on, and important information gets lost in the stream.
Parents need to remain vigilant if their sons are using any of these platforms. Group chats can also be where drama, nasty behaviours, exclusion, cancel culture, and bullying can thrive. In a perfect world, when there is a group chat of eight Year 7 students, there are potentially eight sets of parents that may be checking their son’s phone and reading that chat, thus ensuring all of the eight are respecting each other.
Parents Need to Remain Vigilant as Children Now Have a Variety of Group Chat Platforms at Their Disposal
Unfortunately there have been examples when young people have engaged in nasty behaviour about another person in a group chat, then deliberately invited them into the chat to see those comments. The deliberate nature of this abuse is regarded as ‘cyberbullying.’
At Waverley College we regularly remind our students of the four-step rule:
- Take a screenshot of the bullying
- Report the bullying to your Head of House or Deputy Principal
- Block the sender (never engage with them)
- Delete the offensive material
I would urge parents to help us build self-confidence in your sons too! Teach them the life skill of politely exiting a social situation that they feel uncomfortable in, online and off. This should serve as another reminder of everyone’s role to combat negative online experiences—especially parents. Removing access to the devices late at night helps avoid interrupted sleep caused by the group chat notifications and beeps. Researchers suggest that we lose on average, an hour of sleep per night if our phones are kept in our room at night time.
Group chats happen outside of school hours. Despite this, a student at Waverley College will be held accountable for their actions outside of school hours.
At Waverley College we Teach Students to be Confident in their Relationships Both Online and Offline
Helping your sons take control
Leaving a group chat without warning can offend the remaining group members and become an awkward situation for our text-obsessed generation.
Teach them the skills to know how to leave a group chat that is not helpful or is harmful in any way, including the actual words to use should they need to leave. Fear of missing out (FOMO) is a significant factor in a teenage boy’s life, so you will need to navigate that as well. Our wellbeing team hear reports of young people trying to “catch up” on the hundreds of messages that they have received overnight, first thing in the morning. Their brains are bombarded first thing in the morning, sometimes after a night of often broken sleep checking messages in the middle of the night. They are often anxious and exhausted from it.
In sessions with our psychologists, boys have come up with statements such as “sorry guys, this is getting pretty nasty, I am out of here” as words they can use when they need to remove themselves.
There have also been some humorous responses that can add some humour while they exit a toxic chat, that may also help to defuse a situation. “I don’t have to go but I am pretending that I do,” “I am going to practice my ninja skills and sneak away now.” “ I have to go, the planet needs me,” and do not forget the old “my battery is low” excuse.
However, not all boys have that confidence, and many would prefer to remove themselves from the chat. Again, not always easy for young boys, but we do want them to always be in charge of their online interactions and how those interactions may affect their reputation and digital footprint. It’s important that we help students to realise that they can be “guilty by association,” even if they are not the ones saying the nasty stuff. This is also a necessary part of growing up and parenting. At Waverley, we want our boys to be upstanders, not bystanders.
We want to give young people the skills to put boundaries around their friendships. We do not have to be accessible all the time just because we can be. We want our boys to know their friends will not go away if they are not involved for 30 minutes while they have dinner. Teach them to be in charge and confident in their relationships. Their friends will understand that their refusal to engage at every moment has nothing to do with the state of their relationship. They will understand this is the way they manage their time, their devices, and their priorities.
Tips:
- Keep group chats positive, helpful, and supportive. These are not places where we have a whinge about someone else, reveal our intimate secrets, or create drama, gossip, or spread rumours.
- Teach them how to leave. Boys are often in multiple chats at once. Leave if the chat is getting toxic, bullying is happening, images are being circulated, or anything that may be deemed illegal. Take a screenshot and log out, so they do not find themselves in a “guilty by association” situation if something gets reported. Sometimes they have got no other option but to leave a group chat—the notifications have become too much, the conversation has become increasingly irrelevant, and their phone has become cluttered with too many group chats for them to keep across them all. In most cases, the exit button is easy to find. In the case of group chats on Instagram, tap the header banner in a group conversation to see its participants and then tap on Leave Conversation to quit it.
- Make sure they know they should not feel compelled to respond straight away or be a part of every single interaction.
- Remember that just because there are only six participants in a private chat does not mean that the chat will remain private. There are plenty of ways these chats can become very public.
- Avoid using late at night or letting people know when they are signing off for the day.
- If getting overloaded with alerts, change the way chat notifications appear. Make those pings silent and invisible quickly on both Android and iOS. On Android, open up Settings, go to Apps & notifications, and choose an app to make changes. On iOS, take even more control over the alerts style: From Settings, pick Notifications, then tap on a particular messaging app to see the available options.
- It is also useful to silence individual conversations temporarily. It is easy to make sure alerts from certain people come through while limiting the number of pings from everyone in the chat. Most messaging tools and group chat apps allow conversations to be muted for a period, and the option should be easy to find in the app of choice. If not, a simple google search will give instructions.
Mr Patrick Brennan
Deputy Principal – Student and Staff Wellbeing
E: pbrennan@waverley.nsw.edu.au
