Teens And Social Media Quotes

Be the girl you want your daughter to be. Be the girl you want your son to date. Be classy, be smart, be real, but most importantly be nice.

Freedom of Speech doesn't justify online bullying. Words have power, be careful how you use them.

What you post online speaks VOLUME about who you really are. POST with intention. REPOST with caution.

Don't promote negativity online and expect people to treat you with positivity in person.

Checking in on what our kids are doing online isn't helicoptering, it's parenting.

I have this highly developed fraud-alert for social influencers. From a mile away I can spot an ad designed to undermine the contentedness of vulnerable female teens.

The absolute best way to raise kind kids, is to be kind parents.

Listening to teens talk about social media addiction reveals an interest not in features of their computers, smartphones, or even particular social media sites but in each other.

One of the trickiest parts of social media is recognizing that everyone is doing the same thing you’re doing: presenting their best self. Everyone is now a brand, and all of digital life is a fashion magazine.

Social media is the “Greatest Hits” album of our lives.

When we reach the end of our short lives on earth, Jesus isn’t going to ask us how many followers we had on social media; He’s going to ask us how many of those lives we touched.

How many likes until you love yourself?

Digital life, and social media at its most complex, is an interweaving of public and private personas, a blending and splintering of identities unlike anything other generations have experienced.

Parents - be aware of the books your teens are reading, and the authors they follow. If an author manipulates their teen readers to attack another author through social media or Goodreads or other sites; that author is endorsing bullying and hate. An author who publishes for teens and children, no matter who publishes them, especially one who represents a big publisher, should be held to a higher standard of conduct. But parents should be aware of what books teens are reading, what they are teaching, and the author's standing in the community. - Kailin Gow, Parent Teacher Advisory Boardmember, PTA organizer and founder

Teen "addiction" to social media is a new extension of typical human engagement. Their use of social media as their primary site of sociality is most often a byproduct of cultural dynamics that have nothing to do with technology, including parental restrictions and highly scheduled lives. Teens turn to, and are obsessed with whichever environment allows them to connect to friends. most teens aren't addicted to social media; if anything, they're addicted to each other.

Some people were simply created with the right genes and the proper social skills, I figured. They ended up at a lunch table with a group of good-looking individuals, like them, who did what all good-looking individuals managed: making the rest of us feel both envious of them and sad for ourselves, intentional or not. They had activities outside of school and followers online—people of social necessity who sat at home on Friday nights and 'liked' popular posts in hopes that they, too, might one day be as attractive and personable.

Just because teens can and do manipulate social media to attract attention and increase visibility does not mean that they are equally experienced at doing so or that they automatically have the skills to navigate what unfolds. It simply means that teens are generally more comfortable with—and tend to be less skeptical of—social media than adults. They don’t try to analyze how things are different because of technology; they simply try to relate to a public world in which technology is a given.

Madison and her friends were the first generation of “digital natives”—kids who’d never known anything but connectivity. That connection, at its most basic level, meant that instead of calling your parents once a week from the dorm hallway, you could call and text them all day long, even seeking their approval for your most mundane choices, like what to eat at the dining hall. Constant communication may seem reassuring, the closing of physical distance, but it quickly becomes inhibiting. Digital life, and social media at its most complex, is an interweaving of public and private personas, a blending and splintering of identities unlike anything other generations

Your phone is not your problem. The problem is when we let our phone captivate us so significantly with the unimportant that we ignore the important all around us.

Checking in on what our kids are doing online isn't 'helicoptering,' it's 'parenting.

Scientists have found that the amount of time spent milkshake-multitasking among American young people has increased by 120 percent in the last ten years. According to a report in the Archives of General Psychiatry, simultaneous exposure to electronic media during the teenage years—such as playing a computer game while watching television—appears to be associated with increased depression and anxiety in young adulthood, especially among men.[1] Considering that teens are exposed to an average of eight and a half hours of multitasking electronic media per day, we need to change something quickly.[2] Social Media Enthusiast or Addict? Another concern this raises is whether you are or your teen is a social media enthusiast or simply a

For example, Facebook had planned to launch a Facebook for children code-named "Project Family," and Sheryl would occasionally remind the policy team of their "failure to do this while we had the opportunity," blaming the policy team for missing the chance to get kids on Facebook but she, like most of the leaders at Facebook with younger children, severely limits her kids' access to screens, let alone social media accounts. And she never shares images of her children on social media. Silicon Valley is awash in wooden Montessori toys and shrouded in total screen bans. Parents at work talk about how they don't allow their teens to have mobile phones, which only underscores how well these executives understand the real damage their product inflicts on young minds.

A great deal of the fear and anxiety that surrounds young people’s use of social media stems from misunderstanding or dashed hopes.14 More often than not, what emerges out of people’s confusion takes the form of utopian and dystopian rhetoric.

The youth suicide rate has increased 56% in a decade.36 Girls between 10 and 14 had a tripling of self-harm episodes between 2009 and 2015.37 Teens who are on social media for 5+ hours a day are twice more likely to be depressed than those who are on for less than an hour.38

the success of social media must be understood partly in relation to this shrinking social landscape. Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace are not only new public spaces: they are in many cases the only “public” spaces in which teens can easily congregate with large groups of their peers. More significantly, teens can gather in them while still physically stuck at home.

iGen’ers are addicted to their phones, and they know it. Many also know it’s not entirely a good thing. It’s clear that most teens (and adults) would be better off if they spent less time with screens. “Social media is destroying our lives,” one teen told Nancy Jo Sales in her book American Girls. “So why don’t you go off it?” Sales asked. “Because then we would have no life,” the girl said.

In a chilling 2017 interview, Sean Parker, the first president of Facebook, explained those early years like this: The thought process that went into building these applications Facebook being the first of them... was all about: "How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?"... And that means that we need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone like or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that's going to get you... more likes and comments... It's a social-validation feedback loop... exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you're exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology. Earlier in the interview, he said, "God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains." In short, iGen [beginning with those born in 1995] is the first generation that spent (and is now spending) its formative teen years immersed in the giant social and commercial experiment of social media. What could go wrong?

More often than not, what people put up online using social media is widely accessible because most systems are designed such that sharing with broader or more public audiences is the default. Many popular systems require users to take active steps to limit the visibility of any particular piece of shared content. This is quite different from physical spaces, where people must make a concerted effort to make content visible to sizable audiences.8 In networked publics, interactions are often public by default, private through effort.

Kids are spending so much time communicating through technology, they're not developing basic communication skills that humans have used since forever,' says psychologist Jim Taylor, author of Raising Generation Tech: Preparing Your Children for a Media-Fueled World. "Communication is not just about words. It's about body language, tone of voice, facial expressions, even pheremones, all of which can't be conveyed through social media. Emoticons are very weak substitutes." And when nonverbal cues are stripped away, it can limit the potential for understanding, arguably the foundation of empathy. When researchers at the University of Michigan reviewed data from seventy-two studies conducted between 1979 and 2009, all focused on monitoring levels of empathy among American college students, they found that students today were scoring about 40 percent lower than their earlier counterparts.

Many iGen’ers are so addicted to social media that they find it difficult to put down their phones and go to sleep when they should. “I stay up all night looking at my phone,” admits a 13-year-old from New Jersey in American Girls. She regularly hides under her covers at night, texting, so her mother doesn’t know she’s awake. She wakes up tired much of the time, but, she says, “I just drink a Red Bull.” Thirteen-year-old Athena told me the same thing: “Some of my friends don’t go to sleep until, like, two in the morning. “I assume just for summer?” I asked. “No, school, too,” she said. “And we have to get up at six forty-five.” Smartphone use may have decreased teens’ sleep time: more teens now sleep less than seven hours most nights (see Figure 4.12). Sleep experts say that teens should get about nine hours of sleep a night, so a teen who is getting less than seven hours a night is significantly sleep deprived. Fifty-seven percent more teens were sleep deprived in 2015 than in 1991. In just the three years between 2012 and 2015, 22% more teens failed to get seven hours of sleep.

Sex may be completely out in the open now, but it's still defined and controlled by a powerful subset of elite men. In the past thirty years, ideas about what makes women sexy have become narrower, more rigid, and more pornographic in their focus on display and performance. Nancy Jo Sales wrote an article in Vanity Fair about the 'porn star' aesthetic and young girls' behavior on social media, observing that pornography is not about liberation but about control. The more pornography, the more control. 'Girls talk about feeling like they have to be like what they see on TV,' the director of a youth-counseling service for teens told Sales. 'They talk about body-image issues and not having any role models. They all want to be like the Kardashians.' The pervasiveness of the porn aesthetic, combined with the under-representation of more multidimensional female characters, affects the attitudes, behavior, and ideas about gender roles in both girls and boys, but it's especially insidious for girls' self-concept; as they constantly absorb the message that the choice comes down to either duck-faced selfies across a portfolio of social-media accounts, or abject invisibility.

EUROS SIDE WITH MEXICAN GANG RAPIST Mexico, President Bush’s dearest international ally, brought a lawsuit against the United States in the International Court of Justice on behalf of its native son, Jose Ernesto Medellin, arguing that Texas failed to inform him of his right to confer with the Mexican consulate. It probably didn’t occur to the police to ask Medellin if he was Mexican, with the media referring to the suspects exclusively as: “five Houston teens,” “five youths,” “the youths,” “young men,” “members of ‘a social club,’” “a bunch of guys,” “six young men,” “six teen-agers,” and “these guys”23 (and, oddly, “America’s hottest boy band”). The World Court agreed with Mexico, confirming my suspicion that any organization with “world” in its title—International World Court, the World Bank, World Cup Soccer, the World Trade Organization—is inherently evil. The court ordered that Mexican illegal aliens in American prisons must be retried unless they had been promptly advised of their consular rights—a ruling that would have emptied Texas’s prisons. It wasn’t as if America had shanghaied Medellin and dragged him into our country. He sneaked in illegally, demanded the full panoply of rights accorded American citizens, and when things didn’t go his way, suddenly announced he was an illegal alien entitled to rights as a Mexican citizen. Or as the New York Times hyperventilated: A failure to enforce the World Court’s ruling “could imperil American tourists or business travelers if they are ever arrested and need the help of a consular official.”24 If an American tourist or business traveler ever gang-rapes and murders two teenaged girls in a foreign country, I don’t care what they do to him.

Nonetheless, we have reason to think that, for most teenagers, time spent online can be both good and bad. Teens use texting and social media platforms to make meaningful connections, cultivate friendships, and enjoy harmless entertainment. It is also true that many of the same adolescents find that digital technology invites time wasting, unkind behavior, social comparison, and exposure to disquieting content. In my experience, teenagers will freely admit that they feel mixed about the place of digital technology in their lives.

Teens said—and researchers appeared to accept—that certain features of Instagram could aggravate mental health issues in ways beyond its social media peers. Snapchat had a focus on silly filters and communication with friends, while TikTok was devoted to performance. Instagram, though? It revolved around bodies and lifestyle. The company disowned these findings after they were made public, calling the researchers’ apparent conclusion that Instagram could harm users with preexisting insecurities unreliable.

Twenge suggests that 1994 is the last birth year for Millennials, and 1995 is the first birth year for iGen. One possible reason for the discontinuity in self-reported traits and attitudes between Millennials and iGen is that in 2006, when iGen’s oldest were turning eleven, Facebook changed its membership requirement. No longer did you have to prove enrollment in a college; now any thirteen-year-old—or any younger child willing to claim to be thirteen—could join. But Facebook and other social media platforms didn’t really draw many middle school students until after the iPhone was introduced (in 2007) and was widely adopted over the next few years. It’s best, then, to think about the entire period from 2007 to roughly 2012 as a brief span in which the social life of the average American teen changed substantially

While only 35 percent of teens socialize in person after school, and almost as few speak on the phone to one another, 63 percent exchange text messages daily.3 Kids between the ages of eight and ten use screens seven and a half hours a day, which is high enough, but then that number jumps to eleven and a half hours for kids ages eleven to fourteen.4 This means that most of this generation’s social and cognitive development is happening through a screen. Technology addiction is the new norm for young adults, many of whom will actually panic if they are unable to use social media for as little as a few hours.

Eighth-graders who are heavy users of social media increase their risk of depression by 27 percent. Teens who spend three hours a day or more on electronic devices are 35 percent more likely to be at risk of suicide;

The 1990s saw a rapid increase in the paired technologies of personal computers and internet access (via modem, back then), both of which could be found in most homes by 2001. Over the next 10 years, there was no decline in teen mental health.[26] Millennial teens, who grew up playing in that first wave, were slightly happier, on average, than Gen X had been when they were teens. The second wave was the rapid increase in the paired technologies of social media and the smartphone, which reached a majority of homes by 2012 or 2013. That is when girls’ mental health began to collapse, and when boys’ mental health changed in a more diffuse set of ways. Of course, teens had cell phones since the late 1990s, but they were “basic” phones with no internet access, often known at the time as flip phones because the most popular design could be flipped open with a flick of the wrist. Basic phones were mostly useful for communicating directly with friends and family, one-on-one. You could call people, and you could text them using cumbersome thumb presses on a numeric key. Smartphones are very different. They connect you to the internet 24/7, they can run millions of apps, and they quickly became the home of social media platforms, which can ping you continually throughout the day, urging you to check out what everyone is saying and doing. This kind of connectivity offers few of the benefits of talking directly with friends. In fact, for many young people, it’s poisonous.

A 2015 Common Sense report found that teens with a social media account reported spending about two hours a day on social media, and teens overall reported spending an average of nearly seven hours a day of leisure time (not counting school and homework) on screen media, which includes playing video games and watching videos on Netflix, YouTube, or pornography sites.[30

A parent tells her teen, “Protecting your future is more important than a temporary ‘like’ on social media.” This may seem like wise counsel. Yet, it trivializes what is more immediately meaningful to teens on a developmental and even neural level.

If the rise in gender dysphoria is due to social acceptance, where are the hordes of eager, newly identified trans, nonbinary, gender-fluid adults in their thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, and seventies? Why do we see only teens and young adults coming out with their friends after binging on social media?

growing up with today’s technologies, teens say: “being able to express yourself more, you have more of a voice”; “You can show your feelings through social media”; “We get to express ourselves to a world of people who may have the same interests.

with Facebook’s purchase of Instagram following the introduction of the front-facing camera. By 2012, many teen girls would have felt that “everyone” was getting a smartphone and an Instagram account, and everyone was comparing themselves with everyone else. Over the next few years the social media ecosystem became even more enticing with the introduction of ever more powerful “filters” and editing software within Instagram and via external apps such as Facetune. Whether she used filters or not, the reflection each girl saw in the mirror got less and less attractive relative to the girls she saw on her phone. While girls’ social lives moved onto social media platforms, boys burrowed deeper into the virtual world as they engaged in a variety of digital activities, particularly immersive online multiplayer video games, YouTube, Reddit, and hardcore pornography—all of which became available anytime, anywhere, for free, right on their smartphones. With so many new and exciting virtual activities, many adolescents (and adults) lost the ability to be fully present with the people around them, which changed social life for everyone, even for the small minority that did not use these platforms. That is why I refer to the period from 2010 to 2015 as the Great Rewiring of Childhood. Social patterns, role models, emotions, physical activity, and even sleep patterns were fundamentally recast, for adolescents, over the course of just five years. The daily life, consciousness, and social relationships of 13-year-olds with iPhones in 2013 (who were born in 2000) were profoundly different from those of 13-year-olds with flip phones in 2007 (who were born in 1994).

We need to develop a more nuanced mental map of the digital landscape. Social media is not synonymous with the internet, smartphones are not equivalent to desktop computers or laptops, PacMan is not World of Warcraft, and the 2006 version of Facebook is not the 2024 version of TikTok. Almost all of it is more harmful to preteens than to older teens. I’m not saying that 11-year-olds should be kept off the internet. I’m saying that the Great Rewiring of Childhood, in which the phone-based childhood replaced the play-based childhood, is the major cause of the international epidemic of adolescent mental illness. We need to be careful about which kids have access to which products, at which ages, and on which devices. Unfettered access to everything, everywhere, at any age has been a disaster, even if there are a few benefits.

I have learned one thing from my research, it’s this: social media services like Facebook and Twitter are providing teens with new opportunities to participate in public life, and this, more than anything else, is what concerns many anxious adults.

The importance of friends in social and moral development is well documented.17 But the fears that surround teens’ use of social media overlook this fundamental desire for social connection.

Teens’ use of social media is significantly shaped by race and class, geography and cultural background [boyd, danah , "An Old Fogey’s Analysis of a Teenager’s View on Social Media," Medium, January 12, 2015].

According to a Pew Internet study titled "Teens, kindness and cruelty on social network sites," 88% of teen social media users have witnessed mean or cruel behavior and 15% have been targets of such behaviors (Pew Internet, 2011).

Entz Media went after children as well. The sexualized and gender confused teen ranked highly on the demographics ladder. So did the impressionable tween. Television shows used exaggerated character types to encourage children and teenagers to label one another. Shows featured skaters, goths, gays, jocks, nerds, etc. Children and teenagers were encouraged to identify with one of the labels. Once an identity was embraced, corporations would then define the group's attributes and charge for compliance. Kid's programming was calculated to make them consume. Entertainment was no longer about story telling; it was story selling -- social engineering.

Still, many teens have inadequate or erroneous information about sex and its consequences.11