I spoke to teenage girls about the effect of social media in their lives and on their body image, and where they believe the solution could lie- school.
Social media, though being a relatively new concept, has a huge effect in the lives of young people today. For some, this is positive; and social media does have many advantages- keeping in touch with family or friends, for example.
But do the benefits really outweigh the costs? Social media’s effect on girls and young women, teenagers especially, is huge, due to the increased exposure to the ‘ideal’ body type, creating an unrealistic standard to meet and sometimes resulting in an unhealthy relationship to food ,or mental health/self-esteem issues that can last years.
Between 1.5 and 3.4 million people in the UK are affected by eating disorders, many of which can stem from social media. A massive 75% of them are female.
But interestingly, schools seem to take little action when it comes to body image and social media, neither educating them about the effects it can have or instilling an idea of body positivity and confidence.
For an insight, I asked 4 teenage girls (who will remain anonymous) from the ages of 14-17 about their standpoint on social media, as well as how school handles it.
“For me personally, social media has created an unrealistic beauty standard… being detrimental to my confidence as I feel I will never be good enough”, said one, 16. This is not an uncommon point of view- in fact, all 4 girls had similar viewpoints.
They agreed there was also a common solution- “I definitely think more body types need to be normalised and shared, starting at school”, said one of the girls, 15. Another agreed: “if everyone is educated about how social media can make you feel from a young age, there will be more aware of the realities and people may be less likely to feel they are inadequate”.
All four girls interestingly said that they’d never been spoken to about body positivity or self-love and all felt like this could have somewhat prevented later feelings of inadequacy.
This shows that more action needs to be taken to prevent young girls and teenagers from having an unhealthy relationship to their body, and this should start in schools.
