SHILLONG, Feb 2: Education experts are worried that schoolchildren are being negatively impacted by their addiction to social media.
According to them, children get exposed to the dangers of social media without knowing its long-term impact on their mental health and well-being. They said anxiety and depression are two of the negative effects.
A senior official of the Education department said social media can empower or destroy a schoolchild depending on how he or she uses it. He said addiction is a real cause of concern.
Talking about his experience during a career counseling programme at the St. Edmund’s School, the official said he found most kids to be facing the problem of not being able to focus or concentrate.
According to him, the attention span among schoolchildren has decreased because of reel and short video culture as they are addictive due to dopamine release.
The official said he was told by the teachers that children can concentrate only for about five minutes in a class of half an hour.
Stressing that one needs to have maturity to handle social media, he said the issue at hand is that students are getting access to it before attaining that maturity.
The official is of the view that school students must not be using mobile phones. If they want access to the internet, they should be given access in the form of a computer to visit Wikipedia or YouTube to watch documentaries etc, he stressed.
Meanwhile, Holy Child School former principal Sr. Delphine Fernandez said everyone is worried about the far-reaching negative impacts of social media on the lives of children. She said social media is the reason behind the falling attention span among children.
Sr. Fernandez observed that leisure time is spent on browsing mobile screens, watching reels, videos and playing games. There are times when they even forget to eat their meals, she said.
“Many students are falling prey to cyber bullying and some other forms of unknown fears which cause anxiety and depression. The sleep patterns change and they get mentally disturbed even over silly matters,” Sr. Fernandez said.
She said parents avoid telling anything to their children for the fear of unwanted happenings. She said parents can monitor their children’s social media activities and speak to them about their childhood days when they had outdoor games, friends in school and neighbourhood or when they visited the houses of their relatives.
Joydeep Sen, a science teacher of Little Flower School, agreed that social media has significantly impacted students’ concentration level, making it difficult for them to focus on their studies.
Stating that students were more engaged and attentive in the past, he said relentless exposure to social media has drastically reduced their ability to concentrate and increased aggressiveness and impatience.
Sen admitted that sustaining the focus of students throughout a class has become a major challenge for the teachers.
