Is Social Media Contributing To Teenagers Detaching Themselves From Real Life?

In my new series of posts I will be looking at how the world we live in now will impact upon our children.

One of the fastest moving parts of our everyday lives is technology, in particular social media. We now have a generation of teenagers that do not know life without the internet or social media. My question is, is this not beginning to have a detrimental effect on our children? Is it starting to remove our children from the real world and in particular, are our teenagers now so immersed in social media that they find it difficult to distinguish the difference between what is real and what is fake? The truth and reality of social media is it far removed from anything real, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing.

I have come to the conclusion that it is our sole responsibility as parents to make sure our children are safe online and to respect the dangers that social media can have on our lives today. After all if we are to rely on the social media platforms or governments to regulate social media, lets face it we will be waiting a long time!

It is in much the same way as our parents protected us when it came to the strange person that lived down the road that they warned us to stay away from, but there is a fundamental difference in that we are the first generation of parents that are learning about something like social media at the same time as our children. This can be a scary experience that we won’t always have the right answers for. The chances are our children will understand all things online a lot quicker than us.

There was a time, yes, in my childhood where life was actually very simple. You played up the park for hours on end and the internet, well it didn’t exist and the stress that social media can have on our children wasn’t there. Nowadays our children are bombarded with all sorts of adverts by influencers telling them they should do this, look like that and the pressure on them is enormous and it will have a detrimental effect on their wellbeing and mental health if it is not noticed by us and we keep a check on how they are feeling. We have to watch for signs of anxiety and depression which can be caused by online behaviours by influencers. It’s vital to teach our children that a lot of what is said online or on social media platforms is to be taken with a pinch of salt. Of course enjoy the feeds of the rich, famous and popular influencers but never take them seriously. The warning is simple, taking them too seriously could easily have an adverse effect on their mental wellbeing.

It will be many years before we find out the true effects of social media on our children’s mental wellbeing and health for the simple fact it has not been around long enough. It may well be that it will have no bad effects on our children, but it could also turn out that we have a generation of children growing up in a world that lacks realism or children that lose the art to communicate without the use of a smart phone, or children that withdraw from society and communicate only online.

We as parents need to teach moderation when it comes to technology. Yes, embrace it because it’s here to stay, but teach them to respect it and just like when our parents told us to stay away from a certain house because somebody strange lived there, the same applies to going online. There v tvre a lot of bad people on there so beware because they are hiding behind a screen.

I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.