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With the digital landscape evolving at breakneck speed, TikTok took a proactive step in Morocco by organizing the TikTok Family Academy, a panel aimed at strengthening the digital literacy of families and equipping parents with the tools to better support their teenagers online.
Held at WeMeet, Anfa Place in Casablanca, the event gathered experts in cybersecurity, digital well-being, and media literacy. The central message: fostering dialogue between parents and teens is more crucial than ever.
Meryem Bahri, a psychotherapist and member of the Minnet Sack for TikTok, spoke candidly about the stakes involved in teen digital life.
“We are gathered here today with TikTok to talk about the parents’ role in shaping the digital norms and the digital behavior of their teenagers online,” she told Morocco World News.
She emphasized that TikTok is not just acknowledging these issues but offering tangible solutions, stating, “TikTok developed more than 15 tools in family pairing that could help the parents to open the conversation in the dialogue with their teenagers in terms of how they manage their consumption of TikTok or their creation of TikTok in terms of time management, time away…”
These tools include “Time Away” and “Wind Down” modes that promote healthier screen habits, as well as topic management features to help families define the kind of content teens are exposed to.
“So a lot of tools that are, for me, conversation starters and conversation openers for parents with their kids and teenagers,” Bahri added.
Importantly, she stressed the need for culturally sensitive approaches, highlighting that they also talked about the importance of adapting resources to local context, especially for the MENA region.
The panel also featured Meryem Zakhaji, a consultant in media literacy, who highlighted the necessity of awareness and open family communication.
Zakhaji addressed the widespread use of platforms like TikTok among youth.
“We cannot do without this platform. And this is very important to know because when we are aware that this platform is part of our lives, then we can talk about it with our kids, we can talk about it and we can find ways to deal with it correctly,” she said.
Both speakers emphasized that control must give way to communication.
In Bahri’s words, the parent’s role is not to shelter the child from digital platforms but “to be a guide that would accompany his teenager on social media and not try to shelter him or her for social media or to have very strict rules and to enforce them on the teenager.”
