Teens leave Facebook and why? Because parents are participating and participating more on the largest social media platform in the world. That certainly doesn’t mean that your kids have turned away from social media. Rather, it means that they have found a new outlet.

Snapchat has more than 30 million users and most of them are teenagers and why? This required a bit of research. Fortunately, there is a 14-year-old boy in the house with friends between the ages of 13 and 17. The promising anonymity leads to a pretty crazy discovery.

-Snapchat promotes the aspect of sending an image and instead of hosting it as a “test”, it is immediately deleted. This level of protection for the adolescent is providing a layer of fear to the parents. What exactly is shipped and to what extent? One of the teens said he received sexting photos via Snapchat.

That was not the only one. Instagram is growing in massive waves, and currently teens are turning to the platform from their smartphones. The images are not as elusive as Snapchat, but they are still quite risky, and as one teenager put it, “my dad doesn’t know it exists. I like it, not at all.” Exposure is minimal, because parents are unaware of trends.

I asked the five teenagers the question, what if their parents were like me, Internet savvy enough to find the apps and close them? Remove a smartphone and provide a basic phone for access. Their expressions of horror said it all, but the older one said, “Maybe I’ll finally get good grades!”

As a parent, contemplative and proactive measures are a must! Giving kids an Android, Windows, BlackBerry, iPhone and sending them on the go is not the best idea. One of the teens said his sister was an outstanding student, until he showed her Snapchat. Now he spends countless hours texting.

Secret groups can be derived from this setup, even in the world of Twitter. It is the right of each parent to locate the means of social communication that are accessed. Smartphones are a gateway to the larger and rarely monitored world called the World Wide Web. Just because parents disable data on a smartphone does not mean that a teenager cannot access the data. It just means that they get smarter at locating WiFi connections.

Sure, some teens are responsible, but vigilance is necessary. Texting is already a problem for teens, giving their impressionable minds a smartphone can lead to more problems. The best application method is to configure the parameters from scratch. Let them know openly that they will be monitored, because that is part of having a digital universe in their hands.

Visit the Google Play Store or Apple App Market to review parenting tools available to block certain sites and apps. Many tools like K9 allow parents full monitoring tools. Failure to watch what children do can promote secrecy and the explosion of unknown problems at a later date. Don’t apologize for it. If a problem arises, there are excellent basic devices.