According to Yale Medicine, up to 95% of teens from ages 13-17 use social media. The Pew Research Center survey reveals that 48% of adolescents say that social media has had a negative impact on their life. From 2012 up until now, more teens worldwide are getting addicted to their phones and the internet.
It affects their mental health, children’s attention spans are getting worse, and kids aren’t spending time going outside but instead, staying on their phones. This all happened because they spend too much time on their devices. Would you rather stay on your phone doom scrolling and doing nothing or would you stay non-addicted to your phone and live your life the best you can? I think the choice is obvious.
Adolescents are becoming more depressed because of the internet. Teen girls see what other girls look like on the internet and compare themselves to the “pretty” girls they want to be. It really affects how they think about themselves. It lowers their self-esteem.
Cyberbullying can also raise the amount of teens feeling depressed. Social media is mostly used for connecting with others but on the other side of that, there are people who feel left out and isolated.
Studies show that the more time children and teens spend on the internet, the more they start to lose their social skills. Spending time on their phone takes away time from family and friends. Isolation decreases the social skills people have, especially kids.
Long periods of screen time can cause more problems than you think. It disrupts your sleep in horrible ways. Most teens stay up late doomscrolling on their phones. The blue light coming from your phone affects you badly by suppressing melatonin. Melatonin is the hormone that helps to regulate sleep cycles. It can make it very hard to get a good nights’ rest.
Emil M, a nurse who has kids himself, confirmed this by stating, “Phones have affected kids in more of a bad way. It’s because kids are getting a lot of bad information. There’s a lot of misinformation out there. There are a lot of bad trends that make kids do dangerous things. Phones provide less interactions between other kids. I want kids to play outside more and become more social.”
Cindy S, another parent, provided a short and sweet response when saying, “Social media can make children addicted to their phones and they also take time away from outside activities. It makes them very depressed. The children who are on their phones act differently towards their parents. They also have behavioral problems too.”
Being on your devices for too long can affect you in horrible ways that can even carry into adulthood. Do you want to live your life as a person going absolutely nowhere? Or do you want to put that phone down and live your life the best you can?
