Margaret McGirr
Greenwich, Conn.
To the Editor:
Re “Don’t Let Politics Cloud Your View of Teen Despair,” by Michelle Goldberg (column, Feb. 25):
Ms. Goldberg is definitely right when she factors out that teenagers’ obsession with social media is a contributing trigger for despair. She helps her view by presenting the work of psychologists like Jean Twenge who’ve studied the results of social media on teenagers’ psychological well being.
Nonetheless, it isn’t the social media messages alone which might be damaging teenagers’ psychological well being. Teenagers’ obsession with social media locations them alone in entrance of telephone and pc screens for a lot of hours through the day — hours that was once spent on athletic fields, at purchasing malls, in film theaters, at membership conferences.
Actions that concerned interplay with different teenagers have been changed by being alone in entrance of a display screen, which is unhealthy.
James Tackach
Narragansett, R.I.
The author is a professor of English at Roger Williams College.
To the Editor:
I’ve raised a daughter, now 18, in a really blue metropolis, and that is what I see her technology confront — from popular culture, commerce and political actions, from dad and mom and friends, all of it amplified on social media:
Strain to eat too little. Strain to eat an excessive amount of. Strain to ascertain sexual id. Strain to take medicine, each prescription and road. Strain to flaunt their our bodies, and to work out to extra. Strain on women to be enraged at teenage boys who inevitably peek at their our bodies. Confusion for boys whose concepts of sexuality could be warped by violent pornography on-line. Strain to cancel each other (within the title of tolerance). The listing goes on.
When it received actually upsetting for her, my daughter closed her social media accounts. She was a lot happier.
The Trump years, by the way, had a maybe stunning impact on liberal teenagers. Lots of them joined protests over weapons, girls’s rights, social/racial justice and local weather change. These had been massive and perhaps depression-inducing points to take care of, however the activism round them gave younger folks a way of function, neighborhood and dedication to one thing past themselves.
I love these teenagers for getting by means of all this.
Frances Anderton
Santa Monica, Calif.
Supply: NY Times
