What else can be distorted?

Media’s influence on youth is something that happens every single day, with a turn on of the television, to billboards on the highway, to magazines at the doctor’s office everywhere you go there is a media outlet that is trying to grab your attention and get you to notice what they are trying to say or do. There is rarely a time when you are not exposed to some sort of media outlet and because of this media gains an entirely huge part of your attention and can influences your behaviors to adapt to what is being exposed. Youth are a direct source that media can influence because they are naïve and don’t understand fully that a manipulation is even occurring.

The media tells youth how they should look, young girls become obsessed with the idea of being tall, beautiful and skinny while young boys are being told they should be tall, muscular and aggressive. Advertisement after advertisement has this depiction of what beautiful is and what standards need to be achieved in order to be desirable. When these attributes cannot be met, drastic measures can occur to gain this, from dieting and eating disorders, to extreme low confidence and depression. All this reaches our youth and they become almost intoxicated with the idea of what they should be when they “grow up”. Children that are in elementary school are dieting, and are constantly struggling to be as thin as the models or become equally depressed because they are not as tall or as pretty as what they see on television.

When kids are constantly being exposed to what the media defines as beautiful, how do they ever develop self-confidence?  When most of what is portrayed is a fantasy, or an illusion that has been modified over and over again to perfection, when perfection was never really there in the first place. When adolescents are exposed to this type of media content it only shapes them into becoming obsessive about their appearance and when the realization hits that they will never be exactly like models they see, depression seeps in causing a negative outlook on their body image and setting them up to never be satisfied with what they see in the mirror.

The only way I can see this changing is by recognition. Recognizing and educating our youth about the flaws of the media and showing them that what is portrayed isn’t always what it seems. We need to open the eyes of our youths and celebrate being an individual who is unique and positive and not someone who wants to imitate or replicate what they are told is perfection and beautiful. The impact that we can make today on our youth can set a positive reaction years and years to come, but we have to start somewhere and we have to start fast.