What Teens Are Saying
What Teens Say About about Social Media:
The Positives and Negatives
What Teens Wish Their Parents Knew
Accept that social media is not good or bad — it is a new form of communication that adults may not always understand, but should make the effort.
When you take one device away, you probably don’t realize how many more we have access to. There’s our school computer and your old iPhone 4 you’ve been meaning to recycle–by the way, it still gets Wifi.
Many of us have fake accounts, and it’s not just to outwit you. Sometimes we want to be able to be ourselves with a tighter group of friends.
We like it when you take interest in how we use social media. It makes it easier to share the highs and lows, and we appreciate when you want to know more about the apps we like and use.
We’re losing sleep over social media, literally. 1 in 5 of us is checking our phone in the middle of the night. Please make us tuck our phones in, and you should too.
It’s hard not to accept friend or follow requests when its proof of your popularity. We appreciate you helping us to keep an eye on who’s following us, or enforcing your rules to limit friends and followers to people we know in-person.
Face-to-face interaction isn’t what it used to be, and maybe that’s because everyone’s always on their phones. 44% of us are really frustrated by this, and maybe that’s why we’d rather text each other than try hanging out in-person. We wish more of you would tell your kids to put their phones away.
We get a lot of community support from our online groups. When we’re upset or angry, we want our voice to be heard, and it’s easy to express it on social media.
Sometimes it helps us when you take our phone away, and sometimes it doesn’t. A break from screens can be refreshing when it’s for fun or family time, but when it’s a punishment, it can cut us off from our friends when we need them.
54% of us think that if you actually knew what really happens on social media, you’d be a lot more worried. It makes it harder if we feel like we can’t talk to you about it, so please keep an open mind.
Adapted from: “What Teens Wish Their Parents Knew About Social Media,” by Ana Homayoun, The Washington Post.
- 76% of teens say SM is mostly positive to neutral – Monica Anderson, Jinjin Jiang, Pew Research Center
- What Teens Say – Andrew Watts, Medium
- What Teens Say Part 2 – Andrew Watts, Wired
- Social Life: Teens Reveal Their Experiences – Common Sense Media
