Position Paper

Should parents limit teenagers use of Social Media?

Parents, teenagers, and even children are very familiar with

social media; Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Path. For teens,
social media may help them find new information related to their
life style. They can easily use social media whenever and
wherever they want because internet are available in public
places like school, mall, café and even in teens’ house. However,
using social media may have bad impact for teens. Therefore,
responding to the phenomenon above, parents’ role is very
important in limiting the use of social media for them. In this
position paper, I would like to argue that parents should limit the
use of social media for teens because of three major reasons

The first reason is many teenagers would get addicted if

they use social media without realizing that social media will
reduce social relation among others. Most parents think that
social media is important for their children to have more friends.
Teenagers will be motivated to learn developing
themselves through friends they meet via online, because
here they interact and receive feedback from one another. But in
fact, most of teenagers prefer to connect via social networks
rather than meet their friends face to face. They often use social
network to express their feelings, emotions and any other
activities such as playing online games.
 Second one; social media are often utilized by irresponsible
person to mislead teenagers. Some people think that social media
help teenagers appreciate themselves. The form of appreciation
is by uploading the photos, commenting on their friends’ photos
and many more. Actually, there are many sexual predators every
day that utilize chat room to get acquainted and convince teens to
do things those are not supposed to do like posting inappropriate
photos, and some kind of things that has porn elements .

The third reason, many teenagers who addicted to the

usage of social media tend to get depression and anxiety. This
relates to escapism and dissociation. Teenagers who are
depressed may use social as a type of ‘self-medication’ allowing
themselves to escape and run away from the problems they are
currently facing. In fact, when they log off of this social media,
they are indirectly lead to the further depression that the problem
is still in its place. This can lead to further depression or anxiety
when they ‘log off’ as they still have yet to face their problems and
putting off problems often only makes them worse.

Social media has become an important factor of human

interaction, especially for teenagers. By the presence of these
social media, many of negative effects appear and that cannot be
avoided. The three reasons above are enough to show the
parents that they should limits the use of social media. It is a must
for parents to help teenagers in restricting themselves in. So, help
in keeping our teenagers safe online.