Why are socials medias so important to teenagers ?

Social media is best avoided before 12 years of age. Indeed, before this age children need to explore and experience the complexity of the real world. They need to experience social relationships, to test behaviors and the reactions they provoke, without the distance created by the screens.

Social networks, used by adolescents as well as adults, have changed the way people relate to time, space, learning, etc. If they are fabulous means of staying in contact around the world, deploying creativity, exchanging, learning, gathering, mobilizing, and so on, they are also vectors of many questions sharpened by adolescent reality.

The media generally talk about social networks and technologies to portray the risks and abuses that can be encountered there. Bad experiences are pinned down, dramatized, generalized. This alarming tone, often tinged with "it was better before", does not help to understand or hear what adolescents do and their lives on the web.

Social networks make it possible to forge links in other ways: keeping in touch with distant relatives, being part of communities sharing a common interest, a passion…

But, the distance created by the screen can free up, unbridle comments or behavior, and sometimes push, in the instantaneity of the moment, to do things leading to consequences that are not measured: sharing intimate photos / videos, insults, humiliations of one or the other comrade, challenge and so on. For some, the screen creates a reassuring distance between them and the others which allows them to get in touch more easily. They find refuge there from the difficulties encountered in everyday life, from their anxiety of being in "flesh and blood" contact.

Support in the discovery of social networks, discussions with teens about what they do, live there, see ... is therefore a necessity.

All adults recognize that the theme of social networks is one of the many conflicting subjects to be tackled with a teenager. And if some teens show technological mastery - which sometimes turns out to be very superficial - it is up to adults to question, be interested, and provoke discussion around what is going on and what adolescents are going through. social media. No need to be an expert in technology to talk about intimacy, consent, critical thinking, value of time spent without a screen… As for outings, teens need a framework around the use of screens: moments without screens (meals , a game, an outing…), a timer for realizing the time spent behind the screen… And for adults to allow themselves to remove the smartphone, whether at night, during study moments… giving weight to speech, setting an example is essential.

Teens are sometimes amazed at the indifference that their behavior generates on the web. Adults, friends with them on Facebook, remain indifferent to what they post there on the pretext of modesty or respect for privacy. While teenagers are often waiting for a reaction, proof that they exist for the other.

To build themselves, their identity, teenagers need to challenge adults, to test the limits, which allows them to feel their solidity, their consistency, their creativity and who they are deep inside. Teenagers must perceive a certain empathy, feel in this movement of confrontation that they can also come to confide in an adult when they have had a bad experience, whether it happened on the web or elsewhere. Many are going through times of shame because they have been tricked, manipulated, or worse, on social medias. Still others are stuck with this or that image they have seen and remain cloistered in silence thinking that they are the only ones to whom this situation has happened.

#socialmedia #teenagers #socialisation #communication #webspace