Social Media Once Shaped My Self-Worth. What Will It Do to My Grandchildren?
Updated: Aug 27
Social media has always been a tricky thing for me. I have very low self-esteem to begin with. Because I am a Gen-Xer, I accepted every single person that wanted to be my friend on Facebook. That was just how it worked when Facebook first started.
A lot of my self-esteem issues come from that same group of people that I am currently friends with on social media. They were the ones that I went to grade school and high school with, the ones that teased me and bullied me. That threw food at me in the lunch room and made me sit alone in a corner.
These people laughed at the way I looked, how I dressed and the fact that I was poor in a rich kids Catholic school. It broke my heart every day. But yet I longed for acceptance so I said yes to being friends on Facebook. From a girl that craved friendship and love, even the fact that they were wanting to be my Facebook friend gave me a sense of satisfaction at the time.
In the beginning of social media, I felt that I had to prove to them that I made something of myself, that I was successful, that I was pretty and smart and funny. So, every time I made that post or wrote that thing and no one liked it, it reinforced those feelings of inadequacy. Yet I was still there, still on social media, still posting all the time.
We will be talking about mental health and social media on Ep. 55 of Shining Light on Shadows: A Candid Conversation About Mental Health, "The Mental Health Impacts of Social Media on Teens AND Adults," Thursday, August 27 at 6pm CT / 7pm ET.
Neil Parekh is my co-host. Sree Sreenivasan is our guest. You can watch the recording on Facebook*, Twitter*, LinkedIn or YouTube.
*Facebook will delete the video in 30 days.
I cringe when my memories come up daily and I look back at the things I said 17 years ago. Things captured forever that were obviously attention seeking, even if I didn’t know it or think it back then.
What’s really funny is that now I use my social media for my REAL feelings. For the days when things aren’t fantastic and I need to bare my soul verbally in some way. Now I don’t really care what people think or how they perceive me, because I have learned to use social media as a tool for educating people, for being true to myself and for saying things that other people might think or feel, but just can’t quite get down in a public forum like Facebook.
I also run multiple pages, one for my book, one for my consulting, one for Denim Day, one for an organization that I support. Those are mostly awareness raising and promotional social media sites, but it can get tricky, knowing what to say on which page and managing all of that.
I have scaled back on posting on Facebook since I met my husband. I used Facebook as a way to keep me company when I was lonely (bad idea, by the way). Now I have better things to do with my time. I still post when I have something to say. I still post those vacation photos and photos of my children and grandchildren. But social media is less about attention and more about what I want to say. I rarely hold back from saying what I am thinking or feeling, because it doesn’t matter to me if someone agrees with me or not. It’s my site and if someone doesn’t like it they can scroll past.
My children grew up differently. They use snapchat, and not often. They post quick little quips about things going on in their lives. They have multiple accounts depending on what they want to say. My son has a plants all the time account, my daughter has a Ms. Helmrich, teacher account. It’s a very different world for them. They don’t like TikTok or other social media fads. In fact, I think their generation probably has the most common sense around social media.
Who I am afraid for is my one-year old grandson and other grandchildren to come. My grandson loves my son’s phone. He takes it and grabs it all the time. If you try to take it away from him he cries. He is inundated with screen time all the time. I’m worried about his relationship with people, his ability to interact socially and his eventual health.
I can’t even begin to think about how AI will influence the way my grandchildren function in life. We are already seeing the implications of what AI does in every aspect of what we do on a daily basis. The perception of what is real and what is not is being blurred and understanding how to delineate the two things is going to be very confusing for the upcoming generation.
Having said all of that, I think about the manifestation of technology over my lifetime and how fast things move. I remember being really scared when iPads and iPods first came around. I limited every single technological device that came into existence when my children were growing up. I think being smart as a parent and delaying device usage no matter what the technology is the key. The longer a child has to develop without the influence of social media the better off they are.
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