As videos depicting crimes against children circulate widely on social media, ranging from awareness campaigns to graphic and disturbing footage, many Jordanian parents are struggling to balance protecting their children from harm with avoiding the fear and anxiety that constant exposure to such content can create.
اضافة اعلان
The widespread reach of this material has reshaped how many parents think about their children's safety and their own approach to parenting. In a digital environment children cannot realistically be shielded from entirely, many parents describe feeling caught between the need to warn their children of real dangers and the risk of raising children who see the world as inherently threatening.
One mother, identified only as Umm Muhammad, 46, said her anxiety about her children's safety intensifies with every new story that goes viral online. She said she tries to monitor her children's phones discreetly, without letting them know, and limits the content they can access, in an effort to stay informed without instilling fear in them directly.
Abu Ali, 39, a father, said it took him years to find an approach that worked. He described previously monitoring his children's every move, only to find that this made them more anxious and dependent rather than safer. He said he shifted toward building his children's confidence and teaching them how to respond if they were ever threatened, rather than restricting their exposure to the digital world altogether. He said the change strengthened his children's sense of security over time.
Shielding Children From Adult Content, Not From Reality
Suad Ghaith, a specialist in psychological and educational counseling at the Hashemite University, said not all news intended for adult audiences should reach children. She said repeated exposure to graphic or violent crime content does not build awareness in children, but instead increases their anxiety and erodes their sense of safety, leading them to believe the world is uniformly dangerous.
Ghaith said parents should shield children from this kind of content while still answering their questions honestly if a child asks about a crime they have heard about. She said parents should avoid both exaggeration and denial, acknowledging that such events happen while making clear they are exceptions rather than the norm.
Ghaith said conversations about crime should focus on teaching children practical safety behaviors, such as not accompanying strangers and telling parents about anything that frightens them. She said young children think concretely rather than probabilistically, meaning repeated exposure to frightening content can dominate their thinking without giving them the tools to process it rationally.
Ghaith said children feel safest when they see their parents calm and confident, not when they are repeatedly warned and frightened. She recommended regular, calm conversations that invite children to express their fears, paired with clear answers that do not exaggerate danger. She said children should be taught age-appropriate safety skills, such as what to do if they become separated from their family or if a stranger approaches them, and suggested rehearsing these scenarios through play rather than direct warnings.
Avoiding Overprotection
Ghaith said protection does not require constant supervision, just as independence does not mean leaving children unsupervised. She said the right balance shifts as children grow older, with parents gradually reducing supervision and giving children more responsibility over time.
She identified a common parenting mistake as restricting children's normal activities, such as playing or socializing, out of fear of harm. She said this kind of overprotection does not prevent accidents and can instead teach children that the world is unsafe, harming their psychological and social development.
Ghaith said parents should avoid phrases such as "don't trust anyone" or "the world is full of criminals," which reinforce fear rather than build confidence. She said the goal is for children to understand that dangers exist while having the skills and confidence to respond to them safely, including memorizing emergency contact numbers for parents or relatives.
Warning Signs of Anxiety in Children
Asmaa Touqan, a psychologist, said her clinical work shows how repeated exposure to crime and accident footage permeates children's sense of the world. She said children generally lack the maturity to understand that what they see online is an isolated incident, which can lead them to feel that danger is everywhere.
Touqan said signs of anxiety in children can include frequent questions about death or loss, excessive attachment to parents, and reluctance to attend school. She said children exposed repeatedly to disturbing content can experience the event psychologically as though they were the victim themselves.
Touqan listed additional warning signs to watch for, including sleep disturbances, insistence on sleeping near parents, avoidance of play or leaving the house, irritability, frequent crying, physical symptoms such as headaches or rapid heartbeat, excessive fear of strangers, declining academic performance, and in some cases eating disturbances or bedwetting. She said the underlying problem is not that parents want to educate their children, but that children are often left to process disturbing content alone, without guided conversation that addresses their specific fears.
Building Trust Over Fear
Touqan said effective awareness efforts rely on age-appropriate language rather than frightening stories or graphic detail, alongside basic body safety education. She said the most important factor is building a relationship in which children feel safe confiding in their parents about any incident without fear of blame or punishment.
She recommended teaching children to respond to danger through role-play rather than warnings alone, and said monitoring children's social media use and building their self-confidence both play a role in helping them protect themselves.
Touqan agreed with Ghaith that repeated use of fear-based phrases can harm children's psychological development, suggesting instead that parents use indirect stories to teach children how to distinguish safe from unsafe situations. She said children best equipped to protect themselves are not the most fearful, but those who feel secure within their families and trust that their concerns will be heard.
Source: Al-Ghad.
