Picture this: You return home after a long, tiring day at work, hoping to spend quality time with your children. But instead of everyone gathering around at the dinner table or sitting together in the living room, kids prefer to remain glued to their mobile screens in their bedrooms. Such glaring instances are becoming more common than you may imagine, raising an alarm in the minds of all parents. While mobiles are necessary to remain connected, excessive phone usage (especially for social media platforms) affects kids in concerning ways.
It is making fun family chatters fade into oblivion, hooking kids with instant gratification, taking away their social skills, and negatively affecting them psychologically. After talking to numerous parents and educators and analyzing kids’ behavior over time, we at Delhi Public School, Sushant Lok, positioned among the best CBSE schools in Gurgaon, have identified common yet alarming changes in children’s behavior because of excessive social media usage. If your kids have started spending more time than usual on various social media platforms, they can become subjected to the following behavioral and psychological changes:
-
The Instant Gratification Conundrum
Whether your kids use Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter (Now ‘X’), Instagram, or any other social media platform, you should be aware that all these platforms thrive on instant gratification. Social media users often get accustomed to receiving instant shares, comments, likes, and other engagement actions whenever they share a post/picture. It might seem harmless at the surface level, but it is slowly rewiring your kids’ brains to expect instant results and rewards.
Anyone who has experienced life in its true essence would know there is no concept of ‘instant success’ in real life. Individuals must work hard while remaining patient to reap the rewards in due course. Social media has given rise to digital impatience, making kids steer away from reality. For example, if your kid has finished a school project, he might become impatient for the results and want fast rewards.
It can extend to various areas of their life and hamper their adult life, especially when they start working. Thus, we at Delhi Public School Sushant Lok would like to advise every parent reading this blog post to try and teach delayed gratification to your kids so that they don’t struggle later in life.
-
Virtual Persona Vs. Real Identity
Children are often found to create a different persona when using social media platforms so that they feel more heard, seen, and validated by their audience. If it is not stopped at the right time, it can blur the line between the virtual and real world, leading to an identity crisis for most. When children are exposed to a fabricated persona every day, they may start feeling pressurized to conform to those unrealistic living and beauty standards.
For example, if your kid is always on one or the other social media platform watching influencers, they may begin to mistake a person’s curated personality for their real-life identity. Eventually, they may start comparing their life with their social media peers and imitating their behaviors or actions, giving up their true identity. If you don’t want your kids to face severe self-doubt or feelings of inadequacy, you must teach them to draw a line between the virtual and the real world.
-
Attention Span Erosion
We at Delhi Public School, Sushant Lok, firmly believe that the biggest drawback of excessive social media usage is the increasing rate of attention span erosion. The endless scrolling, a constant influx of content on social media, never-ending notification buzz, and widely circulated short-form content negatively affect your children’s attention span. If kids remain glued to their screens and mindlessly scroll various social media platforms, they can eventually lose their ability to concentrate long hours for focused and productive work.
They may have difficulty doing homework in one sitting or lose focus while studying. This distraction, loss of focus, and reduced attention span can disrupt their academic journey, and the adverse effects can begin showing up in other areas of their life too!
For example, kids may stop enjoying their favorite activities, like a particular sport, because they can no longer fully immerse themselves in any activity. The best way to help kids retain their attention span and live mindfully is by setting strict tech-free periods and teaching them the importance of time management, offline interactions, and physical activities.
Conclusion
No doubt, digital technology has become a part of everyone’s daily life, but there needs to be a healthy balance between the real and reel world. To that end, we at Delhi Public School, Sushant Lok, one of the top cbse schools in Gurgaon, strongly believe that while, as parents, you should not entirely restrict your child’s social media usage, you must educate them about the negative influence of excessive usage. Extreme social media usage can alter your kid’s personality, take away their social and communication skills, tempt them to view fabricated lifestyles/behaviors/actions as real and make them used to instant gratification.
Many psychologists, researchers, and educators have already raised concerns about the negative impacts of disproportionately high social media usage on kids. As such, it is high time parents start taking it seriously. So, parents, gear up – Talk to your kids, educate them, and assist them in getting rid of this addiction.