Social Media And Its Effects On Children

Social media is the face of people in today’s date. People like swarms of flies can be seen hovering on many socializing websites. Earlier everyone thought of meeting people rather than becoming addicted to internet like in today’s time. For children it can be quite damaging as they aren’t used to such an environment. The modernization of society is bound to happen after every few years, this is an age where everyday a new technology comes out and sways customers towards it by means of colorful promotions and advertising. Everything and everyone is getting digitalized which can harm the future generations adversely. It’s good to communicate and chat but getting addicted means there are signs of hampering mental growth and development. This can devour children of their attention span and concentration problems may occur frequently. Mostly the youth between 17 yrs to 28 yrs are quite active on such sites. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Orkut are a few socializing websites where this age group spends most of their time. Internet has made life easier for everyone, from a student to a professional, almost all individuals use internet for their work purposes and entertainment too. It’s always said that excess of anything is bad; the same goes for using internet, people surely learn a lot but that isn’t the case everywhere. Children are glued to their flashy LCDs for more than half of their time. They tend to isolate themselves from friends, family and the outside world. Such kind of attitude hampers their growth and over personality. Although these are the long run effects of internet in some cases, not all have the same result. Internet has lots of advantages too which cannot be sidelined as well. Children, adolescents and teens use it for knowledge purpose which in turn increases their understanding and comprehension, these are very important in today’s date. Online social networking also gives them a medium to express their thoughts freely without any restrictions. This helps them indirectly, they get to know themselves better and in turn they even learn how to answer various questions posed by others. Through internet they get awareness about the daily developments and all other sorts of news from around the world which helps in increasing their knowledge about current affairs. There are youngsters who form groups over virtual media and revolt against a certain cause which can be beneficial to the society in near future. Thus, internet is a sea where they can swim freely without any hassles, learn and practice to become perfect in certain skills. On the other side the negatives also are ground shattering, children tend to view vulgar graphical representations which can affect their minds to a great extent. The impact of such exposure damages behavior to a large extent, change in attitude and understanding towards friends and family creates fractures in relationships which are harmful for the child as well as the respective family too. It indeed affects the lifestyle, eating habits and results in children getting violent and obese which is quite harmful for their health. Last but not the least is the problem of online frauds to which kids are mostly vulnerable.The only way to counter such kind of situations is to reduce the time for internet access for children and help them in focusing their energies to become more active physically. There is a need to keep a hawk’s eye on their behavior and actions to keep them from falling into the ditch. Parents are the first teachers of a child so it is their foremost duty to keep them safe in order to give them a bright future.