Children and Social Media

My ten year old niece told me about her Facebook page and how proud she was about all the 200 hundred friends she had. I thought how a child can known 200 people. When I asked her about it, her answer was “I don’t personally know all of them but they are still my friends”. Nowadays, children have access to social media in a very early age, regardless of the sex, the country or the social status they belong to. I have wondered how having 200 friends can benefit my niece or how having a Facebook profile can benefit any child? My English teacher share with us the article “Children: Social Networking sites, A Debate in the House of Lords;” where the England Baroness Susan Greenfield expose the problems that being expose to social media can bring to children. This has been a controversial debate going around the world; although, every day millions of young kids open their Facebook accounts. The site policies specify that to open an account the user needs to be at least 13 years old, but that policy didn’t stop my niece when she opened her profile at age 9. In that imaginary world you can say and express anything you want to post and your friends have access to all your personal information. Several articles have exposed the hazards of publishing everything on the social media where everybody have access to. Thousands of minors around the world are contacted everyday by estrangers through their media profiles. Most parents are aware of the risk to be contact by unknown people, but not many are aware of the physical risk their kids are facing. Greenfield expresses the constant exposure to social media can lead the children to alienation, isolation and behavioral disorders. That’s why I think that parents should be more involved on their children usage of social media; knowing their passwords, establishing the maximum amount of friends they can have and limiting the time they spend on-line. One of my dearest friends’ daughter, who is also my friend on facebook, posted one day that she was to depress and wanted to end her life. She is just 13 years old. When I told my friend about this post; she said that she hasn’t checked her daughter account on so many days; and that she doesn’t understand why the girl wasn’t posting those kind of things. At the end, the reason was that the teenager was so depressed because her best friends haven’t like her last posts on her profiles, and she was trying to get their attention, (and of course my friend’s attention too.)