Using social media Web sites is among the most common activity of today's children and

adolescents. Any Web site that allows social interaction is considered a social media site,
including social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter; gaming sites
and virtual worlds such as Club Penguin, Second Life, and the Sims; video sites such as
YouTube; and blogs. Such sites offer today's youth a portal for entertainment and
communication and have grown exponentially in recent years. For this reason, it is
important that parents become aware of the nature of social media sites, given that not
all of them are healthy environments for children and adolescents. Pediatricians are in a
unique position to help families understand these sites and to encourage healthy use
and urge parents to monitor for potential problems with cyberbullying, Facebook
depression, sexting, and exposure to inappropriate content. Engaging in various forms
of social media is a routine activity that research has shown to benefit children and
adolescents by enhancing communication, social connection, and even technical
skills.1 Social media sites such as Facebook and MySpace offer multiple daily
opportunities for connecting with friends, classmates, and people with shared interests.
During the last 5 years, the number of preadolescents and adolescents using such sites
has increased dramatically. According to a recent poll, 22% of teenagers log on to their
favorite social media site more than 10 times a day, and more than half of adolescents
log on to a social media site more than once a day.2 Seventy-five percent of teenagers
now own cell phones, and 25% use them for social media, 54% use them for texting, and
24% use them for instant messaging.3 Thus, a large part of this generation's social and
emotional development is occurring while on the Internet and on cell phones.
Because of their limited capacity for self-regulation and susceptibility to peer pressure,
children and adolescents are at some risk as they navigate and experiment with social
media. Recent research indicates that there are frequent online expressions of offline
behaviors, such as bullying, clique-forming, and sexual experimentation,4 that have
introduced problems such as cyberbullying,5 privacy issues, and sexting.6 Other
problems that merit awareness include Internet addiction and concurrent sleep
deprivation.7
Social media sites allow teens to accomplish online many of the tasks that are important
to them offline: staying connected with friends and family, making new friends, sharing
pictures, and exchanging ideas. Social media participation also can offer adolescents
deeper benefits that extend into their view of self, community, and the world,
including1
,
10:
1. opportunities for community engagement through raising money for charity and volunteering
for local events, including political and philanthropic events;
2. enhancement of individual and collective creativity through development and sharing of
artistic and musical endeavors;
3. growth of ideas from the creation of blogs, podcasts, videos, and gaming sites;
4. expansion of one's online connections through shared interests to include others from more
diverse backgrounds (such communication is an important step for all adolescents and affords
the opportunity for respect, tolerance, and increased discourse about personal and global
issues); and
5. fostering of one's individual identity and unique social skills.
6. Cyberbullying is deliberately using digital media to communicate false,
embarrassing, or hostile information about another person. It is the most
common online risk for all teens and is a peer-to-peer risk.
7. Although online harassment is often used interchangeably with the term
cyberbullying, it is actually a different entity. Current data suggest that online
harassment is not as common as offline harassment,15 and participation in social
networking sites does not put most children at risk of online harassment.16 On
the other hand, cyberbullying is quite common, can occur to any young person
online, and can cause profound psychosocial outcomes including depression,
anxiety, severe isolation, and, tragically, suicide.17
Many social media sites display multiple advertisements such as banner ads, behavior
ads (ads that target people on the basis of their Web-browsing behavior), and
demographic-based ads (ads that target people on the basis of a specific factor such as
age, gender, education, marital status, etc) that influence not only the buying tendencies
of preadolescents and adolescents but also their views of what is normal. It is
particularly important for parents to be aware of the behavioral ads, because they are
common on social media sites and operate by gathering information on the person
using a site and then targeting that person's profile to influence purchasing decisions.
Such powerful influences start as soon as children begin to go online and post.29Many
online venues are now prohibiting ads on sites where children and adolescents are
participating. It is important to educate parents, children, and adolescents about this
practice so that children can develop into media-literate consumers and understand
how advertisements can easily manipulate them. Of course, TV in moderation can be a
good thing: Preschoolers can get help learning the alphabet on public television, grade
schoolers can learn about wildlife on nature shows, and parents can keep up with current
events on the evening news. No doubt about it TV can be an excellent educator and
entertainer.
But despite its advantages, too much television can be detrimental:
Children who consistently spend more than 4 hours per day watching TV are more likely to
be overweight.
Kids who view violent acts are more likely to show aggressive behavior but also fear that
the world is scary and that something bad will happen to them.
TV characters often depict risky behaviors, such as smoking and drinking, and also
reinforce gender-role and racial stereotypes.
Violence on television, basically, has three types of negative effects on
people."
1. INCREASES VIOLENCE. Many studies show that violence
on TV actually leads to aggressive, violent behaviors in the world,
most prominently through imitation. They see people being
violent on TV and they copy them as models. They imitate them.
2. DESENSITIZATION AND CALLOUSNESS. "People become
desensitized. This includes being callous towards people whove
been victims of violence." (Ted Baehr, movie and television
specialist and publisher of the Christian Movie Guide,
comments, We say its ok, weve seen it on television. That
behavior is fine. We no longer object to behavior [and language]
that a few years ago we would have been insulted by Weve
become very desensitized, and its corrupting.)
3. FEAR. "It makes them more fearful." Children may have the false
notion that violence or abuse is around every corner and that
there is no good in this world. While this may be partly true, it is
misleading and can cause much damage during the developmental
stages of life.
4. The Ugly: Internet Addiction
5. Addiction was the most widely used descriptor of the one-day moratorium on
technology in the research I just described in a recent post. Internet addiction
is commonly characterized as excessive use of the Internet that interferes with
daily functioning and that can lead to distress or harm.
6. A review of research from the past decade has found that adolescents who
demonstrated Internet addiction scored higher for obsessive-compulsive
behavior, depression, generalized and social anxiety, attention deficit
hyperactivity disorder, introversion, and other maladaptive behaviors. This
research also revealed a interesting pattern of parental involvement. Those
youth who were judged to have an Internet addiction rated their parents as
lacking in love and nurturance, being over-invested, unresponsive, angry, and
severe disciplinarians.