Media Exposure in Children
The age of which children consume various forms of media seems to continuously decrease as the years go on. This can be problematic for many reasons, a few being: sleep inconsistency, delays in social skills, behavior problems, negative self-esteem, and cyberbullying (Healthy Children).
I have been babysitting children since I was 14 years old, and after seven years of watching after children, I have seen many negative effects of media exposure among children. One job in particular was working in a daycare with children ages 3 months — 12 years, and even for the infants, mothers would ask if I could play Cocomelon or other stimulating Youtube videos to distract the babies from crying. I cannot help but wonder how this affects their attention span. On the older side of children, I have babysat children as young as 6 years old who have had a better iPhone than me, and are addicted to being on it. These children have Snapchat, Instagram, and Tik-Tok at such young ages and it could be dangerous for them to have such exposure
On average, daily screen time use went up to five hours and 33 minutes among children aged 8–12, and up eight hours and 39 minutes for teenagers aged 13–18 (New York Times). Children are being exposed to new social media platforms, forms of communicating, and everyone wants to stay up on the latest social media trends. I remember being thirteen years old and just starting to get invested in social media, but it was not nearly as bad as it is in today’s younger generation.
Age restrictions are very important when it comes to social media platforms. Some platforms do a good job at adhering to their age restriction guidelines while others do not. Tik-tok is one platform that is pretty good at keeping up with this. They oftentimes will ban accounts of young children posting who clearly do not meet the age requirement of 13 years old. I believe this is due to Tik-Tok monitors constantly checking feeds, and taking it into their own hands. Other platforms such as Instagram do not do as well as job. This is because Instagram usually does not have a person monitoring Instagram pages, but rather someone has to report the account or post for action to usually be taken.
