The Screen Effect: How Social Media Shapes Young Minds
By: Ranim Elgabakhngi
Children and kids from the youngest generations, alpha and beta, are becoming more indulged and immersed in the content the online space provides. While technology does offer entertainment, its profound influence on developing minds has made many adults quite concerned due to the significant challenges it brings.
Responsibility Avoidance
Most parents tend to keep their kids busy by handing them devices so they’ll have more personal time, as kids remain with unsupervised, unrestricted, and unattended online privileges that lack the much-needed parental control that filters out any harmful content that might be fed to their kids, their responsibility.
Instant Gratification
Online content can be clearly constant when it comes to availability, presented in short yet highly stimulating formats like YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, or TikToks, which kids are accustomed to in regard to their rapid shifts, colors, and instant rewards. It has reduced their tolerance for slow-paced activities, crucial or non-crucial.
Content Consumption
The nature of the content in question by itself is a major concern, often coming off as colorful and loud yet low-quality and meaningless media with barely any effort put into making it by cash-grab and slop-content creators that prioritize income and monetization rather than influence and impact, sometimes even made with AI. It offers little in terms of educational value or genuine engagement; kids soon start to mimic behaviors and languages observed in this content as they are naturally imitative without necessarily understanding the context behind it.
Negative Effects
Kids can often develop a dependency on social media as it offers them a sense of escapism, which leads them to have emotional breakdowns shown in lash-outs against their parents in case of their devices getting confiscated; it can be physical or verbal violence. The development of their focus, memory, and critical thinking may also be hindered due to addiction and sleep deprivation, impacting their health, academic performance, behavior, and problem-solving skills.
Usage Risks
Some parents can be so reckless that they may even give their kids the right to use their credit card or bank account, as kids can be naive enough to fall into online scams created by malicious anonymous individuals, and the consequences are irreversible due to the lack of safety measures. While on the other hand, the collection of personal data by AI-driven systems for the case of the algorithm can raise privacy concerns.
Addressing certain challenges by parents needs certain measures to be taken in an informed approach, such as limiting screen time for enforcing boundaries, setting up parental controls to avoid any major online risks, erasing history and modifying the quality of suggested content recommended on the homepage, engaging in real-world social activities by figuring out what any certain individual kid may be interested in, and installing productivity apps or games that are presented in colorful and fun formats so they can be both entertaining and educational.
