The Impact Of Social Media And Media On Girls

Child educator Kristy Wood is the Director of Kids in Connection and has over 17 years experience working with young people from remote communities to suburban schools. Kristy will be presenting on self-respect and social media for young people at the upcoming Girl to Woman Festival

Throughout my entire career spanning over 17 years, I've seen a substantial intensification of social media and media targeting and being accessed by our kids in more recent years. I've worked extensively throughout many states of Australia and have begun to notice trends that are commonly impacting on our youth nationwide. Throughout my substantial travel and experiences I have heard concerns and comments from children that I feel are important to be shared so that we can stop and reflect on what is really going on for children and young people today.
 
When I often talk about what’s going on for girls today, some people say, ‘yes there’s more technology now but it’s not that different to when I was growing up, we still had peer group pressure and things’. However, as a woman in my thirties and as a teacher working in the area of social and emotional development, I would challenge this.
 
What I am seeing young girls experience today is very, very different to what I experienced growing up at this age. The pressures they are facing and the messages they are getting from a young age don’t stop, it is constant. When they go home from school, the peer pressure doesn’t stop, added to this is the media bombardment and over sexualisation of girls and women.
 
I recently visited a newsagent, and the section of magazines for four to eight year old girls filled up almost half an aisle. When I looked through the magazines most had pictures of models and dolls in very sexualised poses. One colour-in image was the outline drawing of a young girl, pouting and leaning forward suggestively, what was this suggesting to young girls?
The fact is they are invariably going to take on the image, an image that is embedded with a message that says ‘this is what it is to be a girl or woman today’.
 
The impact that modern media, mainstream and social, is having on young girls today is massive. It is a constant pressure and bombardment of images of how they need to be, and it doesn’t stop. It’s 24/7 for their whole childhood, pre-teen and teenage years. It is becoming more and more common for us to accept this as ‘the new normal.’ As a community there is much here for us to look at.
 
Through what girls are sharing they are picking up messages on what it means to be a girl or woman through the internet, tv, movies, you tube, Instagram, Facebook, magazines, film clips, watching older girls, their mum’s and other women around them’.
 
When girls are asked ‘what are some of the messages you receive from this?’, one of the most common responses is, ‘you have to be perfect, everything needs to be perfect, you need to look perfect and act perfect and you need to be super hot’.
 
When I ask, ‘when you look at all these things around you does it change how you feel about yourself? ‘Almost all girls say ‘yes’. They share how ‘you look at that and when you’re not like that, you think that there’s something wrong with you’.

I have heard primary school girls say things like,

I like to watch movies where the girls are into sports and have super toned and muscly bodies. I wanted to have a body like that so I trained really hard, then when I got a body like that more music videos came out that showed women with big butts and all the boys were into that and I was like, oh no'.

She laughed and made a joke about how she didn’t have a big butt and made a sad face, even though she was laughing you could see she was taking all this in and it was having an impact on her self esteem.

Another girl shared that,

Whenever anyone works really hard to get to something, like, to be like one of those women or have a hot body, then as soon as you get there, straight away there’s something else you’re not happy with. Its impossible to meet all the pictures, there will always be something you’re not happy about’.

When I asked girls ‘do all these pressures impact on your friendships’?
They all laughed and dramatically shook their heads saying ‘YES! It effects EVERYTHING! You never stop thinking that there’s something you have to improve about yourself and your always competing with everyone seeing who’s best’.
 
One girl shared ‘It creates a lot of jealousy in your friendship groups and people try to bring each other down because no-one is ever really happy with how they are’.

Another 10 year old girl said,

Or you see your friends change because they think they need to be different. They’re not happy with themselves, they think they need to be something so they start changing and its sad because they’re trying to be something and you no longer have your friend because they are putting on an act of how they think they need to be, it’s sad to see what they are doing to themselves but also you feel sad because you’ve lost your friend and everyone’s kind of lonely in that’.

I have also heard a girl share how she didn’t want to grow up. When I asked her why she said,

Because I see how hard my Mum works at trying to be perfect and have everything together and she’s actually really good at things and always looks beautiful and I don’t think I will ever be able to keep up with that because I can’t do some of the things she does, so I don’t want to grow up and have that pressure and I worry I won’t be good enough’.

Many girls talk about how they are worried about this idea that they need to be perfect and what they observe in the women they see and the pressure and overwhelm of that is having a major impact on them and how they see themselves.
 
When you hear these comments come out of the mouths of young girls you realise that we have a real problem. It is creating major stress and anxiety in many young people and this pressure is just not just isolated to girls. There is an ever growing pressure on boys too.
 
Boys often share that the messages they receive from media are that they have to be tough, have a six pack, have to like violence, have to treat women mean and be prepared to beat them up and they either have to look good, have great hair and a hot car or if they don’t look good they at least have to have a hot girlfriend. I heard a five year old boy putting himself down because he didn’t have a six pack so he thought he wasn’t as good as his friend. When I grew up this was not on our radar at this age.
 
I hear lots of kids talking about the video games they play, some kids as young as five and six are playing games where their character can buy prostitutes, rape women, verbally abuse them, run them over, bash them up or throw grenades at them and blow them up.

Where have we got to as a society, that we are making and marketing games like this to our kids? They may have a MA rating but children are still a target audience of these games, they have easy access to them and they ARE playing them and they also know that adults made these games.
A 12 year old boy was talking to me about the changes he was seeing in his friends when they played these games and what he was worried about, he said that when he goes to their houses they spend the whole time on games and don’t talk or play with you and then they just get really abusive to their family and everyone around them and its awkward to be around when they do that.
He also said,

I heard on the radio that psychologists are being employed to make video games that get kids addicted to them, I just don’t get it, they went to University to study psychology to help people and now they are using those skills to do something that they know harms kids. I have been thinking about why they would do that and the only reason I can come up with is greed, they do it for money’. 

To those who say, ‘its just a game and it’s not having an impact’. I say, spend a day listening to the conversations of kids and observing their behaviours after playing these games and you will see it is, it’s having a very big impact, and not one that I am proud of.
 
You really have to imagine what it’s like as an eight year old girl growing up and having your older brother playing a video game in your lounge room where he is raping or bashing women and that’s now just considered a ‘normal game’. Children are very sensitive and take in a lot of what is happening around them, this situation is devastating for a young girl because it violates the trust she has in people and it feels very unsafe growing up in a world where this type of violence is normalised and seen as a ‘game’.
 
Or imagine being a young boy and having your friends get into games like this and thinking that’s how you have to be too, and that’s what you need to be into when everything in you is deeply upset by what you see. But no-one is talking about it and you know that it’s adults who have made these games, so you think maybe it's okay, ‘maybe there’s something wrong with me’. So you go with it, as so many young boys and men do, simply so they are not accused of being called gay. (and the fact that this is seen as a sign of weakness is of course a problem in itself).
 
This pressure for girls to be perfect and to think that abuse of women is normal is everywhere today, it is creating great anxiety, stress and a real lack of confidence and worth in our girls.
 
As a society we really need to come together, get involved and support young girls and boys. We need every girl to know her beauty and deeply value who she is and be comfortable in her own skin and her right to value herself.
 

When you see young primary school aged girls:
- refusing to eat in case they put on any weight
- sharing that they can’t sleep because they are so anxious that someone might post something bad about them on social media that they can’t put their phone down and they never sleep properly and are crying from the tiredness and stress and you sit there as a teacher wondering what years of living like this is doing to a growing body and mind.
- or when you see girls isolating themselves by taking on a persona of thinking they have to be dismissive, sexualised, abusive and aloof and seeing the great impact this has on the whole peer group including the boys
- or dancing with provocative moves to the latest hit song at a primary aged talent show to a room full of younger primary kids watching this and all the adults sitting feeling very uncomfortable with the fact that this is now just what young girls think ‘dancing’ is.
 

When you hear stories of girls as young as 10 to 14 years being hospitalised for self harm you start to see the magnitude of this problem and you know that we need to work together to address this. We can’t leave it up to our kids to find their way through this mess.
 
We need programs in schools and communities that support both boys and girls to build confidence in who they are and be able to talk about some of these pressures so that they are more equipped to be able to withstand this and feel solid in themselves.

Click here to see the full program of events at the Girl to Woman Festival.
See Kids in Connection for more information about Kristy Wood’s work with young people.