Written by Modenie
Many adolescents are currently struggling with self-esteem when feel the need to be accepted in society. For example, social media shows various advertisements focusing on beauty. A young adult’s development, if not being taught the value of inner beauty, will adapt to this trend as norm. According to Acar et al. (2022), more females have displayed lower self-esteem than males and while their identities are being established, self-evaluation is important for adolescents to reflect on themselves. To measure the conception of worthiness, body shaming is one way for a young adult to be affected after being exposed. For example, my client, a teenager at that time felt insecure about her body until she believed that she was beautiful.
There’s a high level of comparison when it comes to youth being popular. If an adolescent does not like herself growing up, then the media’s portrait of “the ideal” beauty will impact him or her negatively. Other fears with adolescents’ self-esteem through texting are inappropriate sexual interactions, cyberbullying, impair literacy, and texting while driving (Underwood et al., 2015). It’s important to encourage self-esteem and self-acceptance in our children to combat the media’s general perspective of beauty. When it comes to self-esteem, these issues can prevent a young person from fully living a happy life into adulthood.
Acar, I. H., Avcilar, G., Yazici, G., & Bostanci, S. (2022). The roles of adolescents’ emotional problems and social media addiction on their self-esteem. Current Psychology, 41, 6838-6847. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-020-01174-s
Underwood, M. K., Ehrenreich, S. E., More, D., Solis, J. S., & Brinkley, D. Y. (2015). The BlackBerry Project: The hidden world of adolescents’ text messaging and relations with internalizing symptomsLinks to an external site.. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 25(1), 101-117. DOI: 10.1111/jora.12101