How to Help your Kid Set up a Blog

The kids of today’s world are surprisingly smart, incredibly tech savvy, and eager to show their creativity. There are a lot of mediums through which these talents can be expressed, with blogging becoming ever more prominent and practical. This medium allows for deep analytical thought, stirring up meaningful conversation, discussion of art and entertainment, tips for any life skill imaginable, and much more.

If there are thoughts, ideas, or opinions not written down, they are waiting to be blogged about. Children can benefit from starting a blog in many ways, and with plenty of online platforms readily available and free, it is easier than ever to get started.

Promotion of Free Expression

Blogging is an exciting activity that can be incredibly beneficial for children. It promotes free expression of thoughts, opinions, and ideas. Children are young and are still learning, but they should never be stopped from openly discussing how they feel about certain topics, or talking about subjects that excite and inspire them.

Children that feel free to speak their minds are more likely to feel reassured about themselves and have more confidence. This is a core value and belief that can be instilled or stifled at a young age. If your child begins freely expressing their thoughts while they are young, they likely will carry this drive with them in the future.

Fostering Creativity

Another great benefit of blogging as a child is the promotion of creativity. Blogs come in all shapes and forms and are unique to each author. Most blogging platforms come with their own formatting templates that allow the user to customize the overall look of their blog. This includes the color, background, font, arrangement, and the inclusion of multimedia elements like photo and video.

This vast array of possibilities can spark other interest in other mediums of art and creativity such as photography, cinematography, graphic design, or drawing. If your child chooses to follow other people’s blogs, they will likely run into other blogs focusing on art and creativity.

By interacting with other people’s creative blogs and getting feedback on their own blog, they are building the groundwork for creative passions that they may dive deeper into, develop, and master.

Building a Valuable Skill

If your child decides to regularly post on a blog, they naturally will become more skilled and talented with their writing. The repetitive nature of crafting sentences and paragraphs together will foster a desire for more creative and eloquent word choice and organization. As this happens new possibilities will be discovered, vocabulary and grammar will certainly improved, and overall strength of written prose and narrative will grow.

Theses skills will prove to be invaluable through the progression and maturation over the course of life. Through each stage of life writing skills become more and more indispensable. Whether it’s writing for school papers, creating the perfect cover letter, or landing a career as a content writer, the art of the written word will be a key to success. When it comes to careers in writing, the options are wide ranging, but always in demand. There are a surprising amount of jobs out there that primarily revolve around writing that seem like they would be unnecessary.

However, for all of the successful people there are that are simply bad writers, there are usually a few good writers that helped them get there, and are successful themselves. If your child masters the art of blogging itself, their own personal blog could become a career path in of itself.

Concerns for Parents

There may be a number of apprehensions parents have about letting their children start a blog. One concern is the prominence of cyberbullying on the internet. This is primarily prominent on social media platforms or chat rooms, but definitely can happen on blogging websites. One helpful tip is to sign up for your child’s blog using yourself and maintain access to it.

This way you can always log in and take a look at whatever pages your child is following and any comments or notifications that pop up. Another concern is the type of content your child may have access to if they visit other blogs. While blogs are very unlikely to feature content that is strictly pornographic, there may be some coarse language, vulger subject matter, or inappropriate photos or videos featured on some blogs.

The popular blogging platform WordPress.com sets an age limit at 13 or older for this reason. Luckily there are a number of blogging platforms specifically for children under the age of 13, including edublogs.com, kidblog.com, and edmodo.com.

How to Get Your Child Started

The essential step to take first with your child is to help them find a focus of what to blog about. Your child may have a general sense of wanting to write about something, but may need help narrowing down a focus, theme, or purpose for their blog. A helpful tool in figuring this out is figuring out answers to these three questions: what do you do in your spare time? What do you know a lot about?

How can you help others with your blog? A lot of blogs focus on gathering valuable information about a certain life skill analyzing forms of recreation or entertainment. By answering these questions you will help your child grow skills to write to an audience that will value the information, insight, and commentary they have to share. Other blogs focus on more poetic writing. This can be a fun creative focus and a beneficial emotional outlet in the long run.

Kids May need some Help with Design

Once you’ve narrowed down a focus for your child’s blog, you will want to help them through the design, set-up, and formatting of their blog. It’s helpful to browse different blog-hosting sites you are considering using for your child to get to know the ins and outs of how it works.

This will help you and your child decide which one fits your child best, along with allowing you to guide your child through that particular site’s features. This isn’t to take control away from them, but rather to make sure they have all the knowledge they need to use all of their creative potential.

Explore all the font options, color scheming themes, and photo formatting possibilities together to help your child’s blog speak as much of their personality as possible. The site picmonkey is an easy to use online tool for your child to edit photos, create designs, and make collages for their blog.

Once your child has gotten to writing, be sure to offer support for their blog. Be the first to read each one and offer feedback. Don’t be afraid to point out errors or things to improve on, this is part of how they will grow as a writer. Be sure to praise their work and tell them to keep up the good work.

If they end up being inconsistent with their blog posts, encourage them to challenge themselves to make it a part of their regular schedule. After all, that’s what successful bloggers have to do. Always remember that this is their personal project they are working on, if they choose to take on other projects or hobbies instead after giving blogging a try, continue to spur them on.