I was fourteen years old when I started using social media, and it was just for uploading pictures or chatting. I created an account and checked it 2-3 times a week because there wasn’t much to it, but gradually, social media became a world of its own where so many things are happening at the same time. It became a very busy place, and the addiction grew among youths.
We teenagers weren’t left out of the whole vibe, and while it helped some kids back then, social media misled a lot, too. It’s fair to say that the impact of social media on adolescents’ mental health in the world today is complicated and multifaceted; it has inspired both good and bad.
I always say that there are unintended consequences attached to everything science and technology have given to us. While these products serve their specific purposes, they are also capable of doing things that weren’t part of their reason for existence.
Social media, for instance, was created to improve communication and bridge the gap across different parts of the world. We easily interact with people from far and near today, but while serving its purposes, there are people who use it for bullying, fraud, and other things.
With so many things happening in the social space, so many kids have been inspired for greatness. They follow some individuals whose lifestyles seem perfect to them, and they draw inspiration from them, something like a virtual mentor. Even without interacting with these people, they are inspired and focused on greatness.
They apply the positive things they learn from social media, and it has helped their lives miraculously. *A thirteen-year-old programmer once said he was inspired by the amazing technologies successful tech gurus shared online, and he made up his mind to become one someday. At thirteen years of age, he had become an inspiration to people.
In the midst of so many positive testimonies, there are the bad ones involving kids who were inspired wrongly.
They see and engage with the wrong side in the social world, which broke them because they couldn’t handle the pressure and everything else happening there. They picked the bad eggs as mentors and ended up in chaos.
I remember some time ago when some kids of about 14-17 years of age were caught with dangerous weapons. After the police investigation, they discovered that these boys robbed transporters at nights. When asked what they used the money for, all they could say was buying clothes, drugs, and partying.
The police inspector asked why they chose that lifestyle, and one of the kids said, they wanted to be famous and recognized- but they chose the wrong path to achieve those dreams. They wanted to be like the big boys and girls they saw online, not knowing that not everything they saw in that space was real.
To be honest, I think many of these kids are too young to differentiate the real from the fake and they go about chasing the wrong things.
Despite these things happening, most especially the bad ones, we still can’t deprive adolescents of social media because, one way or another, they will still access it with or without our consent. To set things right, parents must be heavily involved in what their kids are doing in the social space.
The apps they use, the celebrities they follow, the groups they join, and other activities can give us a clue about what they are doing in the social space, so it becomes easier to caution them or change their orientation when things are going in the wrong direction.
We must educate them about the harms in the social space even before allowing them to navigate through that space by themselves.
All Image Are Mine.