Call to action: Mom, get off Facebook please!
Think of all the time you spend on Facebook. Chatting, ‘liking,’ looking through pictures, and playing Farmville. Now imagine you had a young child to look after…you’d cut down on the Facebook time and engage with your kid, right? Well, not necessarily. MomFilter, an online family-lifetsyle magazine, worries that moms are getting so sucked into Facebook that they’re neglecting their motherly duties. Just this past April, a northern Colorado woman was sentenced to 10 years in prison for letting her 13-month-old son drown in the tub while she played Café World on Facebook in another room. While the 34-year-old mom only left the baby alone for 10 minutes, that’s plenty of time for tragedy to strike. In response to this and less severe cases of Facebook-obsessed moms, MomFilter sponsored a PSA asking moms to log off and pay attention to their kids:
None of my peers are mothers—so I really can’t say from personal, anecdotal experience if this is a fair accusation to make- that moms put Facebook before their kids. I’ve definitely heard (and seen) the flipside though: Kids who are so addicted to tweeting, texting, Facebooking, gaming, and all things social-media that they completely cut themselves off from family time (granted, not at 13-months-old…yet). I think it’s safe to say it works both ways. We all need to spend less time on Facebook and more time with each other.