Social Media to Blame
Children’s resilience has dropped 11% post-pandemic, and some say social media is a cause. Resilience is something that is key to better mental health and less anxiety. Without resilience, people can struggle to get a job. People naturally gain resilience, but it will take a lot longer than normal.
Parents are being pressured by their children to give them more screen-time and some parents are giving in. Social media is becoming increasingly addictive, and it is having a knock-on children’s mental health. Boredom can be a good thing because it makes children more imaginative, but with the ability to always be occupied by something else they lose this skill.
Children need to learn that when you are knocked down, you should get back up. If you don’t, it will slowly have a large effect on your mental health and anxiety. Children will feel like they are being useless and are not contributing to society. This will have a very large impact in later life. When they are doing their job, they might be lazier, and not want to work hard to get to where they want to be.
Losing is not always a bad thing. There is only one person who is the best at something, so if you want to be the best at something, you can either admit that you are not the best at it and leave it or work hard to improve. Their up-bringing has such a huge impact on this. Some parents make their children lose resilience as they are giving them too many benefits, without a care for their child’s mental health.
Rebecca Willcox, who is a presenter of BBC Morning Live and Deputy President of Childline, talked about what resilience is doing. She says that resilience is having a ‘inner sense and an inner belief that you are going to be okay.’ Becca works very closely with children, and thinks that screens are becoming too addictive and even though watching TV is fine, you should not be watching too much. Too much exposure to screens makes you less resilient as you have everything on a plate for you.
So what should we do about it
There are so many things that parents, schools and everyone connected to children can do to help before it gets to a crisis. Parents can teach children that they must work hard for things, not do all their homework for them and teach them that they must push through hard times. Schools can give their students more responsibility, and not immediately give them the answers when they ask for them.
Teachers can create competitiveness within students to give them something to work for. This will slowly build back up their resilience until they are back to where they should be.
Finally, every single person can put screen limits on children’s devices so their children will not spend all their time staring at a screen, and instead find something else to do. Even the process of deciding what to do today can help to build resilience. Building resilience can start small, like making little decisions, but will ultimately have wonderful results.
Reported by Ben F