There is no doubt that social media leaves a strong positive impact on everyone, particularly children and teenagers. Unfortunately, social media has a very negative and devastating impact on your teen’s self-esteem. According to a recent survey, more than 66% of young people are obsessed with looking good on social media and 33% of them are victims of cyberbullying. About 15% of teens have reported receiving friend requests or proposals from strangers almost regularly in the online world.
It is unfortunately surprising that more than 60% of parents are in dark about what their children do on social media. If you are one of them, it is high time to digest the fact and figure out how to deal with these issues urgently and effectively. This write-up will guide you in the right direction.
Social media has been spiking up in popularity with every passing day. These platforms are most popular among teens and youths. They upload their pictures, post their thoughts, interact with online friends, like others’ posts and comment on those regularly. As a parent, you may find these activities normal and natural but you might be wrong.
Let’s now take a look at different forms of the negative impact that social media inflicts on your child’s self-esteem:
When your child sees a lot of perfectly chiseled bodies and faces on social media, he/she may feel pressurized to look good. They start questioning their natural beauty and then hating it. They fail to understand that no one is perfect in this world and it is quite natural not to have a so-called perfect look.
- The superficially perfect life of friends and others on social media will create a wrong perception of perfection in your child’s mind. Seeing people hanging out with friends, riding in a luxury car, going on a trip, enjoying life in a pub will make your child wonder if he fails to enjoy life to the fullest. Prolonged exposure to a seemingly perfect lifestyle will leave your child depressed.
- If your child, like most of the teens, is attention-crazy, not getting attention will hurt him/her hard. He may feel low and neglected. Over time, your child may build up an impenetrable shell around him. The ‘no one loves me’ mentality overshadows their rational thinking and pushes them into depression. At this point, your child will hide everything and maintain a distance from everyone.
- In order to achieve the fabricated look and lifestyle of others, your child may try to pretend what he is actually not in his real life. Such pretention lowers one’s self-esteem as your child will eventually fail to feel good about what he is in reality.
As a parent, you have great responsibilities to handle the harmful effect of social media on your child’s self-esteem. You should spend more quality time with your child both offline and online. Followings are some tips to help you engage with your child while taking a tour of the online world:
- Keep a watchful eye on what your child posts, comments, loads and shares on social media channels. Take a look at their favorites and subscribed to YouTube videos. It will give you a fair hang of what your child does on these sites.
- Play a thrilling online game together. A number of high-end games are easily available these days and playing those games will contribute to the brain development of your child.
- Explain to your child that true beauty is an extension of one’s self-esteem, impressive personality and good traits. Try to make your child understand that he/she is born to be real and not to be perfect. Accepting the truth will save your child from developing imposter syndrome.
How to Help Your Teen Develop High Self-Esteem?
Your child needs to develop high self-esteem and you can play your part to help him do so. It will make your child more confident and dignified. Let us see how you can do it:
- Encourage your child to do what he loves doing. Does he love music, painting, playing guitar or anything else? There are many options to explore. When your child knows he is really good at something, it will not matter even if someone tells him ‘You are worthless”.
- Always praise your child for his achieve mentor anything else that makes you feel proud of him. It will help him feel confident and self-confidence is most important to excel at anything.
- Don’t fob off your decision on your child; instead, encourage him to decide what he wants to do. He may not be right always but whenever he is, make sure to pour praise upon him.
- Don’t be harsh while criticizing your child. Constructive criticism is good to help your child correct his mistakes but that should be put forward as politely as possible.
If you are wondering how to save your child from falling prey to the negative impact of social media, iKeyMonitor may be a good solution for your purpose. Here is how this tool can help you in this regard:
- This app allows you to limit the screen time. Not having plenty of screen time will help your child develop good habits and stay immune to the harmful effects of social media.
- With the remote check spying logs feature, you will be able to keep a tab on your child’s online activities if there are reasons to believe that he spends chatting with strangers most of the time.
- The tool will let you block different social media apps that you consider harmful to your child’s self-esteem.
- It enables you to monitor SMS text messages and chat messages on popular social media.
Using iKeyMonitor monitoring tool is a good idea but the gold standard of safeguarding your child from the harmful impact of social media is to encourage him to get involved in doing what he is interested in.