
There are over ninety-five percent of teens living in the United States that have some kind of access to the internet and ninety percent of those teens have social media accounts. "Social media is the collective of online communications channels dedicated to community-based input, interaction, content-sharing, and collaboration." (Rouse). Some of the most popular known sites that adolescents use is Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and Snapchat. Adolescents are growing up in an era that highly revolves around social media which can lead to some problems for these teens like peer pressure, cyber-bullying, substance abuse, and being exposed to inappropriate content. 

These harmful effects on adolescents not only harm the children but they also harm the parents of those children. Parents are affected when their kids are cyber-bullied because the kid will sometimes "run away, hurt others, and even take their own lives" (Melinda). According to a study in the JAMA Pediatrics, 23% of teens say that they have been targeted by cyber-bullying. This is a huge concern for parents, seeing their children get bullied to the point that they commit suicide. 

This is why parents should take action and be more aware of their children's social media profiles. Children spend around seven hours a day on social media due to the fact that they are surrounded by it everywhere they go. They can have access to it on a television, computers, the internet, a gaming console, and a cell phone (Strasburger). Al-Khatib stated "Following a survey of 753 middle school and high school students, researchers found that those who spent more than two hours a day on social networking sites like Facebook, Instagram or Twitter were more likely to report distress, poor mental health and even suicidal thoughts" (Al-Khatib). Because of this parents need to start coming up with ways they can watch over their children and their addictive social media behavior. Parents can have full control of their child's social media profile by forcing them to give them the password, this way they can see any cruel direct messages towards them before the child sees it themselves. They could also participate in social media themselves and add their child as a friend in the social networking site. This way they can keep an eye out for any unwanted comments that target their child and report the cyber-bullying. These are just a few ways to help protect thousands of adolescents in the United States from the content that social media harms them with.

Out of the ninety-five percent of adolescents with access to the internet, eighty percent of them have social media. When children are on social media they gain access to anything that anyone in the world has posted. This means that a thirteen-year-old innocent child can see what a corrupt twenty-five-year-old posted. Children are exposed to inappropriate content almost every time they log into their social media. The problem with this is that the "adolescent engagement in social networking sites suggests that their online networks reflect their offline ones, in that most online connections extend from existing face-to-face relationships" (Huang). "One study of 400 adolescent Myspace profiles found that fifty-six percent contained alcohol references and among these forty-nine percent talked explicitly about alcohol use" (Huang). Children are being exposed to bad habits like substance abuse and sexual activity and they take what they have seen from social media and bring it into their offline daily lives. 

Adolescents growing up tend to want to be in the "cool kids" group. At such young ages, kids usually think that the cool kids are the kids who have a lot of friends and are doing crazy activities such as drinking, smoking, doing drugs, and performing sexual activities. These adolescents see those group of kids posting those bad habits on social media and then they think that it is okay for them to do it themselves. They start to inherit those bad habits trying to fit in with the other kids. 

