Journal of Child and Adolescent Behavior
Open Access

Adolescents; Parents; Screen Addiction; Social Media

Introduction

Adolescence is the most vulnerable period of human development and most of the individuals are negatively influenced by environmental factors during adolescence. Many addictive behaviours came to occur during this period including social media addiction, drug addiction etc., and it will eventually affect their future development. Of this, social media plays an important role in the development of adolescents. Most children rely on social media for everything, the risk of addiction is extremely high [1, 2].

The present study has a great gravity in today’s context of children’s life. In the present scenario the role of social media in day-to-day life is inevitable and also the chances of mental health problems like depressive behaviours are significantly high. “Anything good will act as a poison if it is consumed over”, this thought is perfect in the case of social media use among adolescence. Today children are more prone to many threats on internet including bullying, addiction, sexting, violent content. This will affect their academic, social, mental and physical health also [3].

Moreover, due to the rapid change in technology, parents have lesser knowledge regarding social media use. They don’t even know how to use the phone properly, what are all applications that are available, how adolescents handle the phone, whether they are using sites which are not permitted to use. These all prevent parents and children for the effective use of technology [4, 5].

Aim

The present study aims to understand the impact of social media among adolescents (14-18 years) and get to know whether the parents are aware about the mental health issues among adolescence due to social media.

Objectives

• To assess the level of usage of social media among adolescents.

• To assess the impact of the usage of social media among

• To give awareness about social media use and behavioural problems to adolescents and their parents.

• To study whether social media leads to depressive behaviour among adolescents.

• To conduct an awareness session through a resource person.

Methodologys

The methodology of the study entitled “social media use and depressive behaviour of adolescence” is exemplified (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Research design.

Results and Discussion

The results obtained after analysis of data and its discussions are described in this segment.

Figure 2 points out that cent percent of the students have mobile phones, 40 percent of the respondents have laptops and 11 percent of them have a tablet. From Figure 3 we can notice that around 11 percent spent more than 6 hours per day on social media.

Figure 2: Availability of gadgets.

Figure 3: Time spent on social media.

It is clear from the Figure 4 that 26 percent of students were feeling stressed when their parents took away their phone forcefully and 74 percent of the respondent’s claims that they did not feel stressed during such situations. Minority (2%) of respondents felt stressed when they don’t get the expected response for a post uploaded in social media, 13 percent of the respondents felt the same sometimes and majority (85%) of students weren’t stressed about it.

Figure 4: Usage of social media.

From Figure 5, it was astonishing to note that about 3 percent of the respondents experienced bullying via social media sites, 4 percent of the students felt embarrassed about their body image and about 7 percent of the respondents felt useless due to social media usage. From Figure 6 and Figure 7, it’s evident that around 16 percent of the respondents accept that they are addicted to social media and five percent of them believes that it is ok to get addicted. About 12 percent of the teenagers pinpoints that it affects their sleep and 17 percent of them propounds that social media addiction can lead to poor family relationship and interaction [6].

Figure 5: Impact of social media.

Figure 6: Awareness of addiction.

Figure 7: Awareness of parents regarding social media usage of children.

It was interesting to note that 37% of the parents complained of the child using phone unnecessarily and more than half of them pointed out that their children spent their leisure time online. Around 23% of the respondents stated that the children imitates whatever it is shown on social media, 43% of them explained that social media addiction leads to disturbed sleeping pattern and 14 percent of them noticed stress among the children due to addiction [7].

Evaluation of Webinar

They demonstrated below depicts the evaluation of the awareness class taken by the resource person on “impact of social media among adolescents”.

From them it was interesting to note that 62 percent of the respondents understood the concept and was satisfied with the information they have gained on social media usage. Cent percent of the respondents accepted that the webinar provided adequate information regarding all the essential concepts of social media. Around 94 percent of the participants pointed out that they learned the fact related to mental health effects of social media among teenagers and how to rectify such situations. In total, 72% of the participants rated very good for the overall efficacy of the program conducted [8, 9].

Conclusion

The present study discusses “social media use and depressive behaviour of adolescents and assessing the awareness of parents regarding social media addiction among adolescents”. This study enables parents and adolescents to understand social media addiction through the questionnaire provided. It also analyses their awareness regarding the depressive behaviours caused by social media use.

The study concluded that more than half of the participants were aware of social media addiction and mental health issues due to social networking sites. Majority of the parents have an opinion that their child is being addicted to social media and it has been reflected in their behaviour especially in academics. The awareness session was beneficial for both parents and adolescents as it provided adequate information regarding the selected topic [10].

Acknowledgement

None

Conflict of Interest

None

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