The Effects of Social Media on Teens
Do you remember the days when social media did not exist? The time as a teenager when you called your friends and talked for hours, or rode your bike to their houses to tell them all the latest gossip, or to make arrangements to hang out? As an adult, you chatted with your friends over the phone or met them in person. For your long-distance friendships, you wrote letters and, later, emails. Social media has changed the way we communicate with each other. With the swipe of a finger, we can learn about a friend from high school thirty years later. As mature and responsible adults, we know how to spend our time on our phones. We don’t believe everything we read, and for the most part, we scroll past posts we disagree with. Teenagers today have an almost endless supply of social media platforms to choose from and often host profiles on a few. Their role models not only include the predictable celebrities, sports players, and actors but also various influencers, whose job is to get us to buy a product or behave or think differently about a topic. But what are the effects of social media on teens? Should we be worried? The Benefits of Social Media Before discussing social media’s negative effects, we should point out the benefits. Communication has never been more accessible than now. Your teen can chat with their older sibling stationed in another country on FaceTime or learn about class changes from their school’s Facebook page. They can keep up with the football game schedule on X or get ideas about prom from posts on Instagram. Teens can also scan college QR codes and learn more about their chosen fields through the universities’ pages. If they are looking for motivation for a career, [...]
