“Kids are growing up with more anxiety and depression rather than self-esteem.”

I often wondered how people could stay glued to their phones for so many hours. How they wouldn’t look away from their phone for so much as four seconds. This is the type of behaviour that is changing our society. If people continue to use social media more than spending time with people face to face, our generation is going to have increased risks of mental health issues amongst young people. Teenagers are easily peer pressured into doing things on social media that other people are doing like buying followers, posting inappropriate photos and bullying others online. They are to worried about how many followers they have and how many they need to have more than other people. These kinds of obsessions are what leads to mental and psychological disorders such as depression and anxiety. These days there is so much more access to technology and social media. Did you know that 88% of teenagers aged 13 – 17 years old own their own smart phone and 35% of teenagers that have a social media account have diagnosed depression or anxiety.

With all this access to technology more children will start to get more addicted to social media. I interviewed Shelley Ligtermoet who is the youth pastor of CityLife Church. She told me that “There are so many voices speaking to our young people that people are going through identity crisis’s, like what is the truth? I mean if everybody’s opinion is right then what is the truth?” Shelley puts in a great perspective for parents, educators and journalists to think about. It is not just the technological advancement in this generation, it is also the amount of voices young people must listen to and form opinions from.

Social media changes the way people interact with each other these days. With social media, it is a lot quicker and easier to contact people, while it is also easier to meet new people and make connections as well. However, social media provides people with less interpersonal skills, a lack of conflict resolution and very little amounts of privacy. Therefore, social media diminishes the constitution of social interaction for the new modern generations coming.

There is increasing numbers of social media sites and platforms in our society. It is a huge technological advancement which is an important part of the today’s teenage lifestyle. Shelley Ligtermoet who is the youth pastor at CityLife Church. She told me that “The world has definitely changed in the way that we interact and communicate with people. Most of this is due to the rising issues of social media.” Shelley also mentioned that, “Our world is now flooded with people’s opinions and so everyone has an opinion about something and feels the need to share and be heard so their opinion can be known as valid and the ‘truth’.”

The statistics and results from this report show and prove that too many people are addicted to social media. Apple has seen this as a rising issue and during early October 2018 they made a new IOS update that now includes a new setting called “screen time”, where parents can see how long their children are spending on phones and what they are doing.

This topic is a lot more serious than people tend to think. If someone had committed suicide, due to cyberbullying not many people would really notice because they are too worried about how many likes or followers they have. It is about time we put a stop to all this madness going around on the internet. It is time to separate the virtual world from reality. It is time to get people off their phones and realise what is happening to our society.

“If we don’t try to change our habits, who will?”