Disclaimer: Most of the data provided throughout the article comes from 3 primary sources, each with its own cited sources. If you would like to learn more, the references are: Impact of the Covid-19 Pandemic on Children, Youth, and Families (Judge Baker Children’s Center, 2020), Policy Brief: The Impact of Covid-19 on Children (United Nations, 2020), and The Social Dilemma (Film).
We live in an age where you can contact someone across the world in a blink of an eye or look up any question you have and get an answer moments later. While these sound like gifts, which they are, what happens when these gifts shape every part of your identity? Today’s children do not know life without their smart devices. They see individuals and pages to compare themselves to, idolizing people based on their follower count and judging others based on their social status. The algorithms embedded in our favorite social media sites shape our children’s learning process. What began as a tool parents used to keep their children preoccupied has inadvertently become their teacher.
Now enter the Covid-19 pandemic: mass confusion, hysteria, and death. Schools shut down, businesses closed (many forever), and the unemployment rate soared to 14.8%. While attempting to decrease the transmission rate and end the pandemic, we did not anticipate the detrimental effects our policies would have on children, some effects being permanent. As the United Nations stated in their 2020 report titled Policy Brief: Impact of Covid-19 on Children, “While children are not the face of this pandemic, its broader impacts on children risk being catastrophic and amongst the most lasting consequences for societies as a whole.”
So why children? We can bring awareness and give financial support to any demographic, so why children? They cannot defend themselves, and there is no other demographic facing such horrendous long-term effects as our children are today. By the end of this piece, we hope you see the grave circumstances they are in and understand why we created tinyfrens.
Social Media
To adequately address how social media affects our children, we need to see how it affects all users. The Social Dilemma is an excellent documentary that explicitly addresses how the AI and algorithms behind our favorite social media apps operate and how they slowly coerce the way we think. With the users being the product, or as Jaron Lanier, the godfather of virtual reality, would put it, “it’s the gradual, slight, imperceptible change in your own behavior and perception that is the product.”
Now enter a new generation of children into the market. Kids as young as five, and sometimes even younger, spend hours scrolling through their personalized feeds every day. Comparing themselves to their peers, celebrities, and “influencers.” Since most people treat their social feeds as a highlight reel of their life, individuals place unrealistic beauty and financial standards upon themselves at such a young age. Whether by using Snapchat filters to clear up blemishes on their face or a 12-year-old photoshopping their Instagram posts to look skinner, children are losing their innocence and the ability to live life with no other worries other than making sure they finish their friendly neighborhood Manhunt game before dark.
Social media has robbed children of their childhood by creating unrealistic standards in every way possible. You could always look cuter, be funnier, have more followers, likes, and retweets. We are only just starting to grasp the long-term effects this will have on their brains at a neurological and psychological level.
As Jonathan Haidt articulates in the documentary, the number of teenage girls admitted to a hospital due to self-harm remained stable until 2009ish. Then we started to see this number increase drastically.
And here is a graphic detailing the US Suicide Rates.
Our children’s brains and thoughts are being slowly and methodically altered by these algorithms and the artificial intelligence embedded in these apps, as all users are. Except that for our youth, their brains are still developing. The attention extraction business model is molding their minds with each dopamine hit as it is still evolving. Social media companies use this model to generate more profit by keeping users on the app as long as possible. This business model has untold consequences on a child’s self-esteem and mental health.
Generation Z is the first generation who had social media in middle school and has stuck, for the most part, with it ever since. We are only just starting to see people understand and fear the potential ramifications of a business model focused on keeping your attention. It preys on humanity’s weaknesses and exploits that for profit.
Our brains did not evolve and anticipate having nonstop dopamine hits, yet here we are. We never faced external criticism/validation at the scale the youngest generation does today, yet, again, here we are.
Now imagine social media addicted youth combined with…
The Pandemic
Before addressing the pandemic, we would like to note that this project is not a hub for medical advice to children or parents of said children. We are simply highlighting what experts have said to be the immediate and long-term effects of the Covid-19 policies on the youth. The policies themselves aren’t our concern, but the policies’ ripple effects on our children — that is our concern.
In-person schooling aims to educate our youth and give them an environment to interact with their peers and develop their social skills. However, the pandemic has deprived children of getting educated on school grounds and seeing others their age. Removing children’s primary source of social interaction has caused a chain reaction of effects. According to the United Nations, in the first few months of the pandemic, “188 countries have imposed countrywide closures, affecting more than 1.5 billion children and youth.” With the lack of in-person teaching and depending on how extreme parents isolated themselves and their children from the world, today’s youngest generation faces unfathomable long-term damage due to a lack of proper social interactions and education.
Even though two-thirds of countries offered a remote learning program, only “30% of low-income countries have done so.” Even if a child could continue school online, getting a child to focus on their online curriculum became seemingly next to impossible. Parents still had to work to pay the bills, and some were fortunate enough to continue their jobs remotely. However, these parents became full-time employees and full-time caregivers. They had to do their job while ensuring their children paid attention in school, were properly fed, and maintained some sense of regular social interaction (ideally with their peers).
Under extreme stress to keep the boat from sinking, parents became more anxious than ever. Their anxiety seeped into their children’s minds, creating a whole household of tense people. High-stress environments at home mixed with a growing fear of contracting Covid-19 led to a severe increase in anxiety, depression, isolation, and suicidal ideation.
Ideally, parents could remain calm and be role models for their children during those challenging times. However, many parents showed to be incapable of maintaining sanity and order within their household, which led to a dramatic increase in child abuse and domestic violence. With 60% of all children worldwide living under either full or partial lockdown, as of April 2020, domestic violence and child abuse became more common than ever in recent history. Teachers, before the pandemic, were the number one resource for children to expose their abusive home life to, but with children no longer attending in-person classes, how could their teachers see the signs? Parents, and simply people in general, began to crack under this stress, and who faced the brunt of their wrath? Our youth.
Now add up everything we already addressed, including but not limited to the repercussions of social media, forced social isolation, lack of proper education, and increased amounts of child abuse. By doing so, one can deduce that our youngest generation is on course to irreparable damage to their psyche and social evolution.
Our Part
We are just scratching the surface about the problems our youth face today, more being malnourishment in poorer environments, health access, sexual violence, and an overall decrease in mental health.
Here at tinyfrens, we aim to highlight the overall damage done to today’s youngest generation and bring awareness to the topic. As well as show you why tinyfrens needs to exist. tinyfrens aims to be the Web3 brand and community dedicated to supporting and helping our youth. We strive to fulfill one common goal: helping children. How can we funnel and redirect our resources to have the most significant impact on their lives? What can we do to help children navigate the path they have been set on? Something must be done, steps must be made and now, after reading this piece, we imagine you see this too. So, that is why tinyfrens was born.
thank you for reading.
with love,
tinyfrens team
