How to manage school group chats? A guide for parents

With children starting back at school, lots of parents will have found themselves under pressure to provide a smartphone, or let their child get the messaging apps they say all their friends are using.

BBC Bitesize Parents' Toolkit has spoken to parents and an expert about negotiating the tricky world of the school group chat.

“My son said all his friends were getting a phone to start Year 7,” says Dan Bruce, whose son is 11. “We agreed to the phone, partly because our older daughter got her first phone at the same age. It seems sensible that he can contact us, but we’re also concerned because we’ve already been through the trauma of having a young teenager with a smart phone. Now he wants WhatsApp, because he says his friends are on it, but I thought you had to be 16 to use it.”

The required age to use WhatsApp has been lowered from 16 to 13, but many younger children do use it, as well as other messaging apps like Snapchat, Discord - that’s often used for gaming chats - or even Roblox.

Five things to consider when buying your child their first mobile phone

One of Dan’s concerns is about conflict on messaging apps. “Our daughter and her friends had some problems in the first few years of senior school with people being mean on messaging apps. Big dramas would blow up online and we had no idea all this was happening till it had really upset her or her friends. In her year group, there have been times when a group chat out of school turns nasty and then people are upset at school and the staff have to get involved.”

Heather Milton-Brooks’s son is in Year 6 and has asked for a smartphone, though she is holding off. “My concern with messaging apps like WhatsApp and Snapchat is getting involved in conversations that might not be appropriate and not being mature enough to realise that going along with what someone else is saying is almost as bad as saying it yourself. People can also be left out of groups or targeted with horrible messages,” she says.

You have to have conversations about the conversations taking place." - Catherine Knibbs

Catherine Knibbs is a Human Behaviour Technologist and Ethicist as well as a Child & Adult Psychotherapist. She says these issues are things she sees in her work all the time. “The Internet is unforgiving so it’s difficult to make mistakes. Young people are learning to navigate new social norms in a world that’s constantly changing and they don’t necessarily have the skills to do that.”

“Every single issue I’ve dealt with in therapy is where the parent and child’s communication is broken. So, for me, the solution to all these technology issues is conversations, conversations, conversations.

“You have to discuss with your child what they’re doing. They have to feel free to discuss it with you. And you have to have conversations about the conversations taking place.”

Most parents will be familiar with how to use WhatsApp as it’s used so much for work, neighbourhood groups and school parents’ groups. The teens we spoke to tended to use WhatsApp for more formal communication – groups for class homework discussions, or work chats related to their part-time jobs, and for talking to parents and relatives. They preferred Snapchat for talking to their friends and their social group chats were on Snapchat too.

Catherine explains, “Most parents probably don’t fully understand the new technologies young people are using, so we have to join our children in these spaces and learn alongside them. I always advise parents, ‘Join your children in their playground’. If you understand how their technology works and what they use it for – whether that’s a game or a messaging app – there’s less likely to be conflict.”

There’s a really comprehensive guide to lots of messaging apps on the Internet Matters website, which includes WhatsApp and Snapchat.

Whether they’re using Snapchat or WhatsApp, Catherine explains that the way children use group chats is often about peer hierarchies. “It’s about inclusion and exclusion. We used to worry that people might be talking about us behind our backs – that’s always happened. But now if someone says something that isn’t liked on a group chat, they can be kicked from the group and the app will tell them they’re kicked out, and then a new group might be created, and kids tend to call that something horrible like ‘We hate Lucy’. Someone can then screenshot that chat and send it to Lucy.”

“The same behaviours happen in the real world, in the playground, but now there’s a digital record of it, and so often teachers or other parents see these and get involved and things can escalate.”

Talk about what’s happening, not just about the technology." - Child & Adult Psychotherapist Catherine Knibbs

“The temptation is for parents to advise the child to ignore the behaviour, and just to join another group, or turn off the phone, but that’s ignoring the emotional impact. This is where the parental conversations are so important. Being able to deal with rejection like this comes from self-esteem, and that comes from knowing that you’re important to someone. So parents can say, ‘Yeah, it’s really horrible when somebody calls you names,’ and describe similar instances from their childhood – being careful not to make it a competition, of course! Talk about what’s happening, not just about the technology.”

“And if it’s your child doing the excluding, the same applies. If you saw your child kicking another child in the park you’d call them out on it. You’d discuss why we don’t do that, and in the cyber world it’s no different. If you’re regularly having the conversations, it’s easier to parent these online conflicts.”

Plenty of parents have told us they simply don’t join school WhatsApp groups any more – they’re too stressful.

Catherine says, “Some of these parents’ groups can feel like being thrown into a pit of vipers at times and that’s because they are enforced systems of communication - you’re being interrupted when you don’t want to be, and nobody sets the rules. I was invited to join one the other week and I said I’m going to decline, because I prefer to talk to my friends face to face.”

It may be worth joining one WhatsApp group, just to understand the kinds of frustrations your child might be facing in their own groups. One thing that’s worth learning together is how to turn off notifications, so you only catch up on the chat when you have time, and aren’t constantly interrupted. You can also archive a group so you only visit it when you really want to.

This also makes it much less likely that you’ll accidentally reply to the wrong group. Usually, a person’s contact name flashes up just as you stored it in your phone, even if they posted to a group, which makes it easy to mistake a public message for a personal one and reply in the wrong tone.

For both parents and teenagers, therefore, when posting a message it pays to behave in all online groups as you would in any real world social situation.

BBC News reported on one such scenario where things went beyond the group chat.

Catherine says, “We have to think about what’s going on human to human. Technology can facilitate this but, without blaming parents, we have to really start having true conversations with our children face to face. If they can do this in the real world, they’ll fare much better online.”

Further resources:

The Internet Matters website provides information and advice to parents and carers to help their children navigate the ever-changing digital landscape.

Encouraging kids to show kind behaviour online

How to set up your child’s devices safely

More from BBC Bitesize Parents' Toolkit…