Social Media and Young Minds

By Anji Ceron-Rodriguez

Social media can affect teenagers destructively, especially if they started off young 

When kids go online, they’re vulnerable to the “outside world.” There’s no filter to it and that’s very dangerous to growing children. They can also be made aware of explicit content that is not meant for childhood or adolescence. They will absorb this information they see and that can bring dreadful consequences. 

The article “How Using Social Media Affects Teenagers” from the Child Mind Institute explains how teenagers have lower self esteem because of social media. Many teens scroll on their phone, see someone really attractive,  then they start comparing themselves and eventually they fall into an endless maze. 

The risk of using social media at a young age

Teenagers who started using social media at a young age were being exposed to certain things that aren’t meant for kids. They were exposed to explicit content, online predators and bullying. 

16 year old student Sammy from Forsyth Satellite Academy describes social media “addictive.” To put into her words, “Social media is like chocolate, it's addicting.” She explained to me that she emotionally despises it but could never get herself to delete it. She has this mindset that she would have to post herself everyday. She has this pull because she feels if she doesn’t post then people will forget that she’s alive. Sammy bravely shared her past bullying experience, the kids at her school would post embarrassing/bad pictures of her and they would make it into their profile pictures. That really lowered her self-esteem and made her feel bad about herself. Sammy started using social media around 9-10 and she noticed that she was aware of “grown” things and she saw things that were not appropriate for kids. 

Iyana, a high school student from Forsyth Satellite Academy first started using social media at 10 years old. I questioned her if using it at 10 made her more mature or immature and she replied as both. “I’d be more petty on social media but I can communicate better in real life and now I keep things to myself instead of posting it on social media.” Afterwards I asked if she was exposed to things at a young age and she agreed, “Honestly I was too curious and learned quickly. I was watching things I wasn’t supposed to and was normalizing it.”

 Iyana also mentioned that some of her friends were sexually advanced and growing up too fast compared to others due to social media; what they were seeing on it. She suggested that social media should limit certain things to teens and that it should be monitored by a parent until the age of 16 because it can affect childhood and teen years. 

In a guest essay in the New York Times by Rachel Louise Snyder, the author described the work of her colleague Cynthis Miller-Idriss, who studies the trajectory of online violence to real world violence and she offers digital literacy guides for adults. Miller-Idriss believes that they should teach lessons to elementary students and should protect them. She expressed her opinion by saying, “We just throw our kids to the wolves algorithmically, and expect them to recognize and reject it…But we need to do a better job of helping those kids and parents understand what they’re seeing.”

State legislators are introducing measures to protect children while using the internet and internet-based forms of communication, including social media. Over 45 States plus Puerto Rico have at least 300 pieces of legislation pending so far in 2025. 

New York State currently has 15 ​​Social Media and Children Legislation pending.