
According to the study from Pew Research Center, ninety-two percent of teens go online daily and twenty-four percent are constantly online (Lenhart). "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 are 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 lowered self-esteem, peer pressure, cyber-bullying, substance abuse, and being exposed to inappropriate content (O'keefe). As a child logs onto their social media profile the very first thing they see is their news feed. This is where every comment or photo is shown from the people they follow; the adolescent can then come across the inappropriate content posted by their peers. This is why social media is one of the major issues on harming adolescents today because it is the most reliant source of knowledge for them, causing them to learn harmful habits. This is why parent should take action and be more aware of their children's social media profiles.

Children are being becoming more and more self-conscious about themselves. This is due to the negative effects of social media like portraying a false image of a perfect reality or negative comments. These harmful effects on adolescents not only harm the children psychologically but they also harm the parents of those children. Parents are affected when their kids are mentally effected by social media 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, the last thing any parent would want to happen is their own child committing suicide. Adolescents do not know what can truly become of them because of their social media addictions.

Children spend around seven hours a day on social media due to the fact that they are surrounded by it everywhere they go (Strasburger). 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. They need to take their children's social media profiles in a serious manner. Children should not be able to have their own private world at such a young age because they are still figuring out their own behavior. Parents should 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 children see 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. Parents need to sit down with their kids and discuss the truth of social media. They need to explain to them that they are just pictures and not reality; that they should trust themselves and their own feelings, not some falsified photo of someone else's life. 

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. A friend of theirs can repost inappropriate content that they have seen from another profile. This means that a thirteen-year-old innocent child can see what a corrupt twenty-five-year-old posted. Children are exposed to inappropriate or impossible standard 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. This can cause harmful effects to their health if they start doing drugs or drinking alcohol because they saw their peers do it online. Parents are having a difficult time to prevent their children from such habits because they do not even know where or how their children discover them.

Adolescents are a lot more tech savvy and adept to the internet than adults. Susan Villani, a Medical Doctor and assistant Professor of Psychiatry states, "The speed and easy access to the world through the web of cyberspace will clearly have an effect on the growth and development of children just as other forms of media have contributed" (Villani). Social media is a type of way for children to "show off" what they are doing. They can post a picture of themselves in less than a minute. The more "likes" a post can get, the more popular it becomes. Likes are a way for people to show that they think a post is cool. 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 participating in 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. By inheriting these bad habits like substance abuse, they are putting themselves at risk. Substance abuse is known to cause psychological disorders. 

There is more than just substance abuse that social media causes for adolescents. It can also cause psychological disorders. Some psychological disorders that teens can develop from social media are depression, anxiety, or lowered self-esteem. If a child posts something to social media, then there is a chance that they do not gain the positive feeling that they were striving for. Their post can fail in achieving the amount of "likes" that they thought they were going to get or someone who follows them can comment something negative towards them. A negative comment can include body shaming or name-calling. This can cause a child to be depressed or lower their self-esteem because they start to think every day about the comments their peers said to them. Those negative comments then stick to the back of their mind and they feel reminded every day of their life from that negative comment about them. Parents need to apply themselves into their children's social networking lives to help prevent lowered self-esteem. However, this does not apply to all adolescents. Valkenburg, a Doctorate in the School of Communications Research at Amsterdam, states, "The reduced audiovisual cues of the Internet may help these adolescents overcome the inhibitions they typically experience in real-life interactions" (Valkenburg). She explains how social media can be a great use of online interaction for adolescents who are too nervous for face-to-face communications. Kids who are too shy about their personal appearance can post their own pictures, which can only show their best assets or only show their best memories. This can help their self-esteem but how long would that actually last? This theory may help their online social skills but it most likely will not help their face-to-face communications in the real world. This is how they easily become addicted to social media. Adolescents crave for those "likes", they endeavor to post a picture on Instagram or a tweet on twitter that will grab the attention of everyone else. This is why the majority of people post falsified images of their "perfect reality", to achieve those "likes". 

When scrolling through a news feed on social media like Instagram, majority of the posts someone will come across are showing impossible standards of success, beauty, or lifestyle. Teens will post a picture that will only capture one moment of a night out. This moment can create an image to other viewers that they have had a perfect and an amazing night. Most adolescents will fail to realize that their whole night may not have been exactly like that. The picture they have seen only captures a mere minute or so of their night. That could have been the only time that person has smiled through the whole night. This can cause problems with adolescents these days. Viewing those images of their friends can cause stress or depression in a child. 

Social media can show false images, seeing a perfect image of someone hotter, smarter, having a better body, or having the time of their lives; this can really damage someone's self-esteem. It is like that saying "A picture is worth a thousand words", in this case it is worth a thousand negative words towards people who strive to be like them. Jacobson quoted in his article, "Donna Wick, EdD, founder of Mind-to-Mind Parenting, says that for teenagers the combined weight of vulnerability, the need for validation, and a desire to compare themselves with peer's forms what she describes as a "perfect storm of self-doubt." She's so thin. Her grades are perfect. What a happy couple. I'll never be that cool, that skinny, that lucky, that successful" (Jacobson). Jacobson discussed that some researchers at Stanford University came up with this phrase known as "Duck Syndrome". "The term refers to the way a duck appears to glide effortlessly across a pond while below the surface its feet work frantically, invisibly struggling to stay afloat" (Jacobson). Adolescents may be posting pictures or tweets that create a false image towards other viewers but this does not show how their lives really are. These adolescents seem completely interactive and psychologically fine over social media but they can be having psychological disorders in reality. This is not only a problem for those certain children but it is also a problem for the adolescents using those posts as discouragement. 

Those teens viewing those posts compare them to their own lives by looking at how perfect their peers lives seem and how imperfect their own life seems. Jacobson quoted Dr. Emanuele, "Kids view social media through the lens of their own lives ...  If they're struggling to stay on top of things or suffering from low self-esteem, they're more likely to interpret images of peers having fun as confirmation that they're doing badly compared to their friends" (Jacobson). This only creates an even worse case of negative feelings towards themselves causing depression which can lead to suicide. Jacobson also discussed a few cases of teens committing suicide. He says that the teens seemed perfectly fine over social media like nothing was wrong and then the next thing you know; they take their own life due from depression. 

This is how social media is affecting adolescents today. Young children are taking their own lives because of the psychological depression, they are getting into bad habits like substance abuse or sexual activity at a young age, and their self-esteem is completely gone because of the impossible standards social media has bestowed upon to them. They need help realizing the difference between impossible standards created by social media and reality. This is where parents need to understand social media themselves and learn the outcomes of what it can do to their children. This way they can step in and help prevent their children from being harmfully effected by social media. Social media is not necessarily all that bad, it just all depends on how well adolescents can handle it. 

