Learning to Communicate
Communication is something that everyone will experience at least once in her life. Feeling disconnected, alone, and frustrated because you can’t connect to people is a real problem in society today. Our children and teens aren’t developing crucial social skills like they should be, and we must look around and ask ourselves why this is. Social media and cell phones are having a major impact on people’s social skills. Children shouldn’t have cell phones and social media until their parents decide they’ve developed far enough to be able to handle the social pressures that come from cell phones and social media.
Self esteem plays a big part in communication; if you’re secure with yourself and confident in your abilities, it makes it much easier to approach others and start conversations. This helps build a base for effective communication, while feeling insecure and having a lack of confidence can lead to dysfunctional social skills. Social media plays a big part in self image and social security. Children, teens, and adults all put a lot of self-worth into social platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat. They base their self-image on the number of likes they get on their post or their follower count, and when the likes don’t come it kills their self-esteem. Social media should be used only when the child has shown that he or she is confident with their self-image and can handle the let-downs that come from social media without letting it affect their self esteem and confidence.
Communication is more than just the words that are used in the conversation -- it’s also about eye contact, body language, and tone. We subconsciously send little signals when we’re socializing about how we’re feeling. Maintaining eye contact is important in conversations, and tone can determine many aspects of the conversation. Before email and texting, people were required to talk face to face and therefore learned to notice these social cues as they matured. Besides writing a letter or talking on the phone, it was necessary that people knew how to hold a conversation and communicate effectively. When children grow up texting and emailing their friends instead of speaking to them face to face, they don’t develop those valuable social skills that are necessary in human interaction. And when people can’t notice these cues, parts of conversation can be misinterpreted or implied incorrectly, and this can lead to conflict and disconnection.
Some would argue that texting, social media, and emailing is necessary to maintain a long distance relationship or to keep in touch with relatives and friends. While this is true and those are certainly great points, it must also be noted that developing relationships should take place in person and not over text. You get to understand how a person thinks, acts, and portrays emotion when you talk to them face to face. Maintaining a relationship is where texting and social media should come in. But you’ve already got an excellent base to build off when you text them; it’s difficult to get to know a person over text.
Social media and texting has killed so many of our social skills. Millennials don’t know how to properly communicate with each other, and many of them spend hours of their lives on social media. What they don’t know is that they’re really damaging themselves and their own potential for great relationships by not going out and socializing. We need to get our society off the screen and on the scene, we need to go out and talk to people rather than text someone from our phones. For our society to properly function, we must know how to communicate with one another, therefore it’s essential we develop crucial social skills and learn how to use them.
In conclusion, children shouldn’t have cell phones and social media until they’ve proven they can handle the social stress and they’ve developed proper social skills. There is no set age for a child to learn these things, it varies from person to person. Social media causes insecurity and controls children’s self-esteem. Texting doesn’t allow children to understand eye contact, body language, and tone, therefore leaving them incapable of properly communicating with others face to face. Society needs to regain these social skills in order to function properly, and we can start by teaching our youth to interact with each other instead of stare at a screen all day.
