Wednesday, March 5, 2014

Family Reunions Using Social Media

By: Marcin Sajda

One of most fulfilling ways I’ve seen social media used among families is the reunion. Often people have been torn apart, or drifted apart through the years and have lost touch with each other's whereabouts. Social Media has made it easier to search for a loved one and to reconnect through Facebook or other social media sites that allows you to share pictures, messages and video chat. These reunions could be between older siblings, estranged parent/child relationships, extended family members, or even family friends. There are also stories of adopted children reuniting with their birth parents or relatives. Although there are some concerns, in the area of adoptions, unlike normal family reunions, these are a bit more legal and psychological issues to be concerned about. According to the article 'Tips for Better Handling Social Media, Your Teenager and Adoption Reunions' there is no proper consoling on how to approach the reunion as there would be with a proper facilitator involved. Unlike in a formal meeting done through a proper adoption reunion agency, social media is a slightly more casual way to reunite in an adoption situation and unlike a regular reunion, should be treated with more caution, as the expectation are much higher.

Adapted from www.foxnews.com
In other cases, unfortunately events such as missing children are the reason parents use Facebook as a resource to find their child. In the article 'How Social Media Can Reunite Lost Children With their Families', Tony Lofti’s 13 year old daughter ran away from home. Tony was the one who turned to Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites to spread the word about his missing daughter, his daughter was later found alive living with a sexual predator. Lofti’s soon after in 2012 organized http://www.findyourmissingchild.org/ which is a social media site that helps reunites families with missing children.

In each case, social media was able to reunite families in a positive way. For some this could be a great way to find a distant cousin from your childhood. For others this could be an extremely emotional connection to the birth family you’ve never met. Since social media as embraced this form of reconnection, there are many social media sites that have embraced these reunions, making it easier for both parties to mutually find each other, which I believe is the where social media will embrace the family reunion going forward.

Resources:
http://adoption.about.com/od/parenting/qt/Tips-For-Better-Handling-Social-Media-Your-Teenager-And-Adoption-Reunions.htm

http://mashable.com/2013/01/25/how-social-media-can-reunite-lost-children-with-their-families/

http://global.fncstatic.com/static/managed/img/U.S./family_reunion_istock.jpg 

1 comment:

  1. This is defiantly my favorite part about the internet, when good things happen like family reunions. It’s so hard now a days to keep up with everyone's phone number and where they all are that social media has made it easy to keep in touch with your loved ones. I saw a commercial on TV for http://www.ancestry.ca/ it’s a website you can go on to see your roots and all your family members. It would be really cool to use that site to look up people and use social media to see if you can get in contact with some of those long lost relatives.

    I think the part about children running away is awful but the use of social media is a great tool to get the message out there. In the case of social media it can be used to mislead parents to Jade and I were watching Dr.Phil on Monday (hahah I know kind of corny but we love it) and it was about these girls who murdered there best friend. After they committed the crime they took to social media asking people to help find there friend and to say how much they miss her. They even set up support sites to help her parents look for her. Everyone was under the impression that the girl had just ran away. This went on for 6 weeks before one of them confessed. Isn’t that crazy that they used social media to show their support but yet in real life they knew exactly what they had done. It was a really sad but interesting story you can check it out at http://www.drphil.com/.

    I loved reading your post Marcin.

    By Sarah Rafiq

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