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The Tech Enthusiast urged the Federal Government to implement a cybercrime law to curb social media abuses.
Austin Agbakor, a Tech Enthusiast, Start-up Coach and Mentor, says children who over-engage on social media are liable to be ineffective and perform poorly on delivering assignments.
Agbakor, who is the Chief Executive Officer, CVHUB4AFRICA, an Information Technology (IT) Company, said this in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Lagos on Wednesday.
He said that from his years of mentoring youths and children that he had discovered that social media addiction affected the performance of children in their academics.
“Social media addiction is over overuse of your time on the internet, especially on social media platforms.
“However, there are different categories of addiction. Let me talk of basic addiction that’s those who before going to bed they are online and waking up they’re checking their phone, if you want to appropriate time, we should be talking about eight hours to nine hours daily.
“Let me say that social media addiction causes a lot of distractions, and may result in delayed learning,’’ the IT expert said.
He said that the way to guide against social media addiction in children was to monitor or regulate their access time.
The start-up coach and mentor said that parental controls in which parents initiate screen time limit and share or have login access to the children’s social media handles was essential.
He said: “Personally, i won’t advise parents or teachers to cut video games out of a child’s life completely.
“I believe with endpoints solutions and access control applications, you can easily grant or deny them access even browsing time and download bits. Just setting up boundaries will help your child find other activities interesting.
“You can limit the amount of time they play video games by setting protocols to stop video games or YouTube, some of this premium internet security anti-virus software programmes have that feature.,’’ he counselled.
Agbakor said further that action-adventure games for children also had its positive and negative impacts on children.”
He said that when children are overexposed to these games, it had the tendency of making them aggressive in behaviour.
According to him, children are more likely to imitate the behaviour of the characters thy see in their games, adding that they also have difficulty in distinguishing reality from fantasy.
“For example, my six year old son, who enjoys action-adventure games like UFC, Wrestling and Boxing started showing some of these traits even to the elder sisters, even though the age gap between him and them is seven years and 10 years.
“Sometimes, he wants to show violence then, I had to limit him access to these games.
“Well, like I mentioned earlier everything that has negatives can be very positive too, but the truth is that social media has come to stay as part of man’s life pattern and also core essential part of modern society.
“So, we have to learn how to live with it successfully,’’ the tech expert said.
Agbakor noted that it had been proven that social media had…
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