Social media over the last five or six years has gotten very popular, especially for teenagers. Many times they find themselves relying on social media to help ease their anxiety or any other feelings they have. This leads to addiction, making it hard to live without it.
When someone is addicted to something they don’t always realize it. Teens are so focused on what happens on their phone that they don’t pay attention to how much it consumes them. It can take up most of their time and energy which makes it harder to concentrate during times when they don’t have their phone on or with them.
There are many teens who feel the need to share their everyday life on social media where everyone can see. All of these factors lead to tremendous amounts of stress and in worse cases, depression. During the school year for students, social media can typically keep them up until late at night.
This can oftentimes lead to sleep deprivation, which is very hard to deal with while in school. Grades can go down and so will effort. Another huge thing about social media at school for teenagers is bullying. You might post the wrong thing or send something to someone that you shouldn’t have, and get made fun of for it. You might say something wrong about someone to one of your friends, and it gets out to the whole school. You might feel the need to even bully others for something they post.
Despite all of the cons, there can also be pros. One of the key factors of social media is communication and new ideas. Those news ideas can influence better job opportunities and benefits. Another big key factor of social media is being able to see what is going on in the world and be educated on a lot of things that you should be.
Most of the time parents and teachers can see when their teen or student is being consumed by social media. This causes them to feel like their teens are not ever in the moment because they always feel the need to look on their phone to see what other people are doing.
According to the New York Times, teens and children as young as 8 years old screen time has gone up 17 percent in the last two years. Along with TV, videos and a variety of video games.
There are many benefits to having social media on your phone, but you might be able to tell that social media can cause many problems in a teenagers life. That makes it very hard to have good mental health a lot of the time.