How Bad is New Generation’s Social Media Addiction and How to Stop It
Let me sum it up for you: it’s bad. It’s pretty bad. Social media addiction and the need to seek social validation began with millennials and gen z, but it seems, if not handled appropriately at the soonest, it is likely to grow out of hand into something much more problematic.
High Reliance on Social Media
Every single passing day it seems that the reliance on social media for a myriad of things including passive income is growing and expanding and at the same time merging into yet something more important as well as extremely vital in order to be able to lead a fully normal life.
It seems that social media has become somewhat crucial for our survival and without it, not only are we missing out on a multitude of things, but our lives are not worthy enough on their own if they remain lacking in terms of the appropriate amount of social approval that is required to feel good about oneself.
Effects of Unhinged Social Media Usage
Constantly looking at the notifications, checking for views on a story, counting the number of likes on a post, perpetually looking at your recent post, secretly hoping to see more compliments in the comments, this weirdly popular yet never-ending thirst for approval and praise from online strangers you’d likely never come across offline, people who are probably living a double life or hiding behind a fake identity that never ends.
It keeps growing inside you and you secretly start holding hate in your heart for every other stranger from all the way across the world that you bump into online whom you feel looks better than you, is better than you at a skill you never properly learned, looks financially better off than you or are just all together in love with their own life.
Grow Out of It
Hate is heavy. Let it go. There is no such thing as perfection, if you are not perfect, neither are they. It is just that you spend all of your time with yourself and hence are aware of all your shortcomings, failures, and mistakes.
You know your best features and your worst alike. Unlike that random stranger online who only magnified and presented their best features on Instagram that made you insecure about yourself when the only lesson you really should have taken away from that online interaction should have been to focus on your best features instead of your worst, the same way that stranger chose to.
Keep Your Children Safe from Social Media Addiction
Imagine your child being in your place and becoming insecure with someone for absolutely no reason. You’d feel bad, wouldn’t you?
Now imagine if you could stop all this before it even began. Yes, I’m saying that you could protect your children from social media addiction before they ever become addicted to it in the very first place.
Naturally, if a child got less and less free time to spend with a screen doing whatever, completely unsupervised, it is less likely that they would develop an addiction to a continuously animated screen since all of a sudden it becomes not so animated.
The trick to keeping your child more engaged in the real world than the digital world is to give them something to look forward to. Line up their daily schedule with more interesting and fun activities that they enjoy participating in and learning through.
Set up a daily schedule for them on working days and make sure it includes fun activities, games, play dates, and things other than studies, even if it is educational material, be sure to make it fun and enjoyable.
Limit their screen time using a parental control app like FamilyTime.
