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.