NEED TO KNOW
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Dylan Dreyer and Vicky Nguyen discuss how social media impacts kids’ self-esteem and body image on ‘The Parent Chat’
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Nguyen shares her approach to parenting with screen time limits to help her daughters discover their identities first
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Dreyer recalls her 9-year-old son Calvin asking if he looks “fat,” highlighting early exposure to societal pressures
Dylan Dreyer and Vicky Nguyen are facing a major problem every parent has to deal with at one point: social media.
Nguyen joined the Thursday, April 16 edition of Dreyer’s The Parent Chat, where they discussed how the internet has influenced the way they raise their children. Nguyen is a mother to three girls, ages 17, 14, and 9, while Dreyer is a mom to three boys, ages 9, 6, and 4.
While Nguyen has screen time limits for her kids and other rules they must follow, she does it because she wants her children to discover who they are first.
Dylan Dreyer and her sons.
Credit: Dylan Dreyer/Instagram
“I like what Matthew McConaughey said, which is, you want to let them figure out who they are before the world starts telling them who they are,” Nguyen said. “I think especially for girls, but it’s starting to happen with boys, too.”
“The body image, the self-esteem, the anxiety, the depression rates, all of it goes up because they haven’t figured out yet how to really just stay in their lane, run their race, live their life,” she continued.
That is when Dreyers brought up a recent experience she had with her oldest son, Calvin “Cal.”
“They’re exposed to enough of it,” she said. “Calvin, he’s 9, and he asked me, ‘Do I look fat?’ I was like, ‘What?! First of all, you look healthy.’”
Dylan Dreyer
Credit: Nathan Congleton/NBC/Getty
Although Dreyer, who shares her kids with ex Brian Fichera, didn’t have social media growing up, she believes her kids will one day thank her for letting them find themselves first, before facing the pressure of social media.
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“I feel icky after I look at Instagram,” she said. “I’m feeling insecure, and I’m not an insecure person. I know my lane. I’m confident in my areas. But I’ll watch Instagram and suddenly I’m like, ‘Should I be going to Fashion Week?’ Because it seems like everybody I know is there, and I start to feel insecure about myself.”
Read the original article on People
