Starting out, blogging is usually a hobby for your child. They may follow other kids online and want to emulate them. This hobby, like most others, can have its pros and cons. Psychologists advise not to leave a child alone with it. Ideally, the parents should help and guide their offspring.

Blogging can give your child a voice and enable them to interact with others who share similar values. Here are some of the other benefits of letting your child blog.

Blogging is a good option for training your speaking and writing skills. It can make your child more comfortable with public speaking and enables them to learn how to present themselves to the public, gain confidence and get rid of stage fright.

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Blogging helps stimulate creative thinking and ideas. While many start out shooting YouTube videos or blogging by copying someone else’s good ideas, as time passes, they develop their own style and format.

Your young blogger will learn how to use light, build a frame, create an image, style and look, and master different video editing software in the process of putting together their blogs and videos.

Blogs/vlogs are a way for your child to express their views and opinions, defend what they believe in and share thoughts with like minded people. This in turn can build confidence and self esteem, but does need close monitoring by parents as comments can be hurtful as well as positive.

Be sure to label any content put up by your child as for kids. On YouTube, comments are automatically disabled on videos designated for kids on the channel.

One of the key ingredients for the success of any blog is regularity and consistency. The child needs to think over a content plan, write scripts, watch out for trends, analyse the market and publish to their chosen channel(s) regularly.

Combining this with school and study, children will have to learn quickly how to manage their time and prioritise. Another important life skill for everyone to learn.

For a small number of children, advertising offers do come in if their blog is particularly popular on certain channels. Parents need to be there to help and guide children if this happens. Although don’t be surprised if your ten-year-old child can already distinguish barter cooperation from the CPA payment model!

Blogging can help build communication and collaboration skills. Bloggers often team up with other creative people to implement joint projects. Collaboration is a useful skill for every person learn. It can also help improve negotiation skills as they need to ensure their vision is aligned on any project.

As you can see from the above, blogging has several advantages that can have a positive effect on your child’s development. However, as previously mentioned, all this requires parental support. Indeed, without your experience, skills, and knowledge, it will be difficult for your child to make it work.

You will have to help your offspring with much of the process, especially to start with, everything from coming up with video ideas to choosing the best screen recorder.

There are also drawbacks to children blogging and vlogging online including;

Spending time online can reduce face to face interaction and can affect friendships. As children devote their free time to the blog and begin to consider subscribers as friends. They could start relying on their opinions and develop unhealthy relationships online.

While it is great to write about what matters to you and defend your ideals and beliefs online, people have opinions and not everyone is nice. This is even more true online, where people can hide or distort their identity.

Negative comments could distress your child and leave them feeling upset or worse. Be sure to tag your child’s blog as for kids to try and minimise these critical comments and prepare your child for receiving them before they come in.

You will need to limit the time your child spends online. Blogging can distract from learning, which could contribute to a drop in academic performance.

A blog can make your child feel and act older than they are and give them a false sense of the world. Parents need to have oversight at all times to ensure their child is conducting themselves online in a safe and age appropriate way.

There are an endless stream of ideas for blogs for children. Some children’s blogs tell us about a kid’s carefree everyday life. Others share their creative potential, and others ‘advertise’ children’s products. Here are some of the most popular blogging ideas.

• Lifestyle – A vlog in which parents, on behalf of the kids, talk about how their days go, what they do, where they go, what situations they are going through. These are a kind of personal diary.

• Hobbies – Not only on YouTube, but on the internet as a whole, you will find children talking about and sharing their hobbies. Some play a musical instrument, others demonstrate hand-made crafts, draw, dance, conduct science experiments, demonstrate magic tricks and recipes and so on. If your child has an interest or hobby they want to share it can be a great way for them to connect with other like minded people.

• Reviews – Your child could share reviews of toys, sweets, books, plants, recipes and much more. If your child is interested in sharing reviews, check out the different categories YouTube before they get started. Reviews as some of the most successful child blogs online. They bring their own style and personality to the reviews, and other children love to watch and read reviews from their peers.

Parental involvement is essential with any form of online activity by children. If your child really wants to give blogging a try, make sure they know the pros and the cons and how to stay safe.