The Negative Effect that Social Media has on Adolescent Girls in Today’s Society
The Negative Effect that Social Media has on Adolescent Girls in Today’s Society
Q News
By Cassandra Mischak
In today’s society, almost everybody is carrying a smartphone with them. Whether it is at work, during physical exercise or even in one’s downtime. Our daily way of life has immensely evolved around the use and need of our cell phones.
Yes, there are several positive aspects as to what our phones offer us: instant communication, accessibility, social media presence and much more.
However, most people in today's society tend to disregard the obvious of how glued we are to our screens, specifically our various social media accounts.
Particularly, teenage girls are wreathing the negative effects that social media exposes them to.
From the minute most teen girls wake up in the morning, they instantly reach for their phones. On the drive to school or work, you can witness them scrolling through instagram and checking up on their friends' whereabouts. When they sit down to eat a meal, you can see them liking their favorite Tik Tok creators' new videos or instantly responding to their best friends' current drama messages.
These social media platforms may seem to come across as all sunshine and rainbows from an outsider's perspective, but from an internal standpoint, many of these teenage girls are battling their mental and emotional health, while engaging with their devices.
The outrageous amount of time spent glued to your screen can be a debatable argument from the perspective of what you are using your device for.
According to a 2019 report from Common Sense Media, the amount of time teens, ages 13 to 18, spend staring at their screen is dramatically rising over the past few years. It is reported that these teens spend seven hours and twenty-two minutes per day on their devices.
Coinciding with the report, aside from television and video games, social media scrolling takes up an estimated 40% of those seven hours and twenty-two minutes a day.
As we know, there are countless outlets of social media used around the world. In today’s generation, for teens, the most commonly-used applications are YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram.
A report from Pew Research Center claims that the majority of teens use both YouTube and TikTok every day, but some even say that they use these sites constantly.
This research also states that about three-quarters of teens, 77%, say they use YouTube daily, while a smaller majority of teens, 58%, say the same about TikTok. In addition, about half of teens use Instagram, 50%, or Snapchat, 51%, at least once a day.
Excessive social media screen time, of course, puts a negative impact on teens in numerous ways, but what’s even worse is the effects it exerts on their mental health.
The advisory from a Yale Medicine report states that studies point to a higher relative concern of harm in teenage girls and those already experiencing poor mental health, as well as for particular health outcomes. For example, cyberbullying-related depression, body image and disordered eating behaviors and poor sleep quality is linked to social media use.
This ongoing issue is predicted, by several sources, to only get worse, for every generation, further down the road.
Although we can’t take away phones, tablets and devices from our world today, what we can do is limit and control the accessibility for teenagers.
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