A note to the young children about social media

Hello everyone. Do you remember when you joined social media? I joined Facebook in the year 2012 when I was in class 6. Sometimes after school I used to login for just a few minutes and talk with my friends. At that time everything was very simple. Gradually things became more and more technologically advanced and we have so much to do. Now we have the world in our hands. During our schooldays having internet and a phone was not a necessity but today a child needs internet to carry out his school works. Really, how things have changed over the years! Internet and social media are great platforms to learn but there are a few things which are not good about it and young children are quite vulnerable towards those. In this post I want to discuss about such problems so that the young generation can always be safe and make good use of social media.

Firstly, I want to point out the fact that nowadays there is no lack of social media influencers. It is natural for young people to copy them when they see them. Also, they are captivated towards their lifestyle which appears to be very attractive and glamourous. But we should understand that everything that we see is not true. Such teens might also suffer from inferiority complex or even superiority complex if they start to compare them with others. Also, they may have increased feelings of depression, anxiety and poor body image. People need followers and for that they try to showcase the perfect life, perfect body and how fascinating and adventurous their life is. And if they are getting influenced by wrong personalities it will create a negative environment around them which is not good for the young minds. So, it is important that we follow the right people who can teach us good things, spread positivity and affect our lives in a good way.

Secondly, in social media people from all over the world can connect with us and interact with us. We mostly follow and become friends with our family and people we know from school, college etc. But we often encounter unknown person and sometimes we accept to be their friends. Not all such unknown friendships are good and they can turn into a nightmare for us. Young girls are frequent targets of such people with malicious intentions since it is easier to lure them due to their innocence. Such people might harass them, demand money, share offensive content, threatening messages etc. all of which comes under cyber bullying. There is an increased tendency of such teens to drift apart from their family and friends and may start to feel lonely in the outside world. There will always be a section of people who are carrying out such activities and it is very important for us to be in a safe friend circle, not only in social media but also in our life.

Increased use of social media may lead to decreased creativity, can make us miserable, and affect our mental health. FOMO i.e. fear of missing out specially seen in teens may lead to more and more use of social media to stay updated and thus the vicious cycle will continue. All these will finally lead to a decline in the academic performance as they will not be able to concentrate in the books.

While there are lots of negative points on how social media is bad there are equal number of positive ones too. It helps us to learn new things, any information we want is available in seconds and in this digital age we cannot afford to lag behind. Connecting with friends from all over the world creates new learning opportunities too. So, it comes down to a simple point that is, it depends on us how we use it and how we allow social media to affect our life. Young children should be guided by their adults about how to be away from the negative side of it. Teenagers should always find the learning opportunities and only take social media as a recreational tool and not let it affect their mental health. Since in this age of digitalization it is difficult to be away from social media the only way is to be aware of our activities and always ensure our safety.

As I already said I have been using social media from a long time, I face such problems every now and then. Therefore, I decided to discuss it with everyone. I hope this will help you in some way. Thank you for reading. 

 

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