Does Your Teen Suffer From FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out)?

Counselors and psychologists talk to teens and preteens about social media, which plays an increasingly important role in their lives, frequently. These mental health professionals want to find out how much teens know and don't know, and maybe even if they have advice for their moms and their dads.

A diligent parent may be logged into a teen's Instagram or Facebook account with them at all times. These social media accounts let parents know who their teens are with, who has sent them pictures, who they have sent pictures, and what is posted on their walls.

Many American parents take the point of view that once you hide social media, or make it unavailable, children are challenged to find ways to access it behind their backs, so they opt for openness — at least for their children's social media accounts.

The result is that teens and preteens learn to think "Is Mom online?" when they post to their social media accounts. Most adolescents would protest that there is not really anything going on on their Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts, and when there is a problem, it's what some other kid has posted (something that may be entirely correct from the teen's point of view!).

So what usually goes wrong with teen and preteen use of social media accounts? What should parents know about the ways social media impacts adolescent development?

Social Media Focuses the Fear of Being Left Out

As one teen known to the writer of this article put it, "I guest you could say, like, you see, you get on Facebook and Snapchat and you discover that all your friends are hanging out somewhere and you're like, 'Oh, I'm home alone right now.' Then if there is no way you could get where they are you just feel lonely and sad and bad."

Teens and preteens typically don't characterize this experience as "anxiety," but they also usually would say "It sucks." 

An 11-year-old the author knows put it another way, "You find out you didn't get an invitation to a big party, and you feel really bad."

Teenagers have likely always formed cliques. Some teens have always been on the losing end of the popularity contest. Social media highlights this in a new way, because teens aren't just being excluded, but can also see what they are missing out on.

Freaking Out Over "Likes"

Another issue many teens and preteens have with social media is using social media as a metric for popularity. 

Many young users of the Internet have very high expectations of their likeability measures on Facebook and Instagram. They may expect to be members of the "100 club," users who receive 100 likes on their profile changes (photo, relationship status, and location, for example), or they may even expect 200 or more of their "friends" to log on and "like" their online activity.

See Also: Do Video Games Really Increase High-Risk Behavior In Teens?

Counting "likes" becomes a competition. Children may say to each other, "Check this out, see how many likes I have on this post," when failing to take into consideration that many of the people clicking on a photo or a post have never met them, would not recognize them if they did, and have no interaction with them except online.

Social Media Can Make Teens And Preteens Feel Bad About Themselves

Behavioral scientists have repeatedly found that using social media can make people feel worse about themselves.

A team of investigators led by social psychologist Ethan Kross recruited a small group of young adults to answer survey question about how they felt about themselves by text message five times a day for two weeks. They then compared the volunteers' answers to the survey questions with how many times a day they logged into Facebook and how many times they had face to face interactions.

The researchers found that the more often volunteers logged into Facebook, presumably seeing how much fun other people were having, the worse they felt about themselves, and the more often they had face to face interaction with people in the non-virtual world, the better they felt about themselves. Study volunteers who had more face time with real people logged into Facebook significantly less often, and people who spent more time on Facebook rated themselves as significantly more worried and lonely than people who spent less. Neither group, however, seemed to recognize that online activity had any particular role in how well they felt their lives were going.

"Over a billion people belong to Facebook, and over half of them log in every day," University of Michigan social psychologist Ethan Kross, principal investigator for the study, told CNN. 

Why do young adults (and, presumably, teens and preteens) who spend more time online on social media experience more negative emotions?

• Perhaps they are comparing themselves to people who are having more fun and distraught that they can't join in, as is the case with many teens and preteens, and
• Perhaps they are seeing the successful careers, marriages, and family lives of others and feeling jealous, as German researchers found in a January 2014 study of adults who use Facebook.
• Perhaps they know they are wasting time they could be using to interact with real people in enjoyable ways, and feel sluggish and unproductive when they realize deep the social media pull is.

See Also: A Parents' Guide To Their Daughter's Puberty

So how can parents help their children use social medial to make life more enjoyable rather than to make life more frustrating? Here are some suggestions:

• Don't let monitoring online activities take the place of face to face interactions in your own family. The more time you spend helping your children recognize, articulate, and obtain life goals in the real world--beyond merely "hanging out"--the lesser grip of social media on their emotional wellbeing.
• Do encourage person-to-person communication even on social media. Encourage children to buffer the short statements they can make on Internet platforms with messaging to explain what they mean to individuals who may misunderstand them. And however grating you may find emoticons, ask your children to consider using more emoticons to avoid leaving a negative impression in social media.
• Talk about social media early and often. Don't expect everything to go right after just one conversation. Be open to talking with your children about their concerns in relating to others, both online and in 3-D.