Step 1

Child development involves the persistent, cumulative and progressive changes in physical, emotional, cognitive and social development of a child. Child development occurs in three phases of life, these stages includes early childhood, middle childhood and adolescence. Childhood is marked by biological, emotional and psychological changes that occurs from the infant stage till the adulthood.

Social and Emotional development: This domain is marked by the understanding of emotions of self and others. The changes in self-concepts, relationships, emotional understanding, motivational changes all occurs throughout the development. As the child grows, he develops the understanding of basic emotions and is able to identify what others are feeling, and how he feels about them. A child shows empathy, moral reasoning as he emotionally develops. They manifest their understanding in the way they interact with other in the society. A child learns to associate and play with other children, make friends, gradually he is able to take his decisions for himself or decides what he wants to eat, or buy.

Step 2

As the child develops, he acquires social skills which helps in interacting with others either verbally or non verbally with gestures or body language. These are the essential skills for the overall social and emotional development of the child. Children develops such skills as they play and interact with other children of the same age.

In recent times, social media has become the part and parcel of everyone's lives. The social media platforms are most commonly used by children and teenager. It has become a popular practice to connect with other's and to socially engage with other through social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. Children's enjoy these hi-tech, convenient and fastest way of connectivity. Children's rather prefer playing online and communicating with their friends than going out and playing with them.

Positive impact: Their are positive aspects such as being able to connect with anyone from any part of the world, students are able to study in groups across the social media platforms, they expand their networks, share their thoughts get feedbacks, they are able to stay in touch with their friends for years. These factors helps in enhancing their communication skills.

Regardless of these positive effects, social media has some major negative impacts which hingers the development of social skills in the children. Negative factors that effects the children's:

Self-confidence: Social media platforms largely affects the self-confidence of the children. Children interact with others through indirect means with the help of social media platforms. The appreciation on social media becomes the parameter for children to evaluate themselves and their confidence relies on that only.
Communication skills: The real world interaction is different from the online interaction. There is a major difference between online interaction and when someone interacts with others in person. A child who is dependent on social media platforms to interact with other and lacks communication skill will hamper the development of such skills.
Decreased Interpersonal interactions: Children spends most of their time online and enjoy watching videos and exploring other things on social media, they rarely feel the need to interact with other. Children avoids going out and playing with their friends and communicating with them in person, this could either be because they are not a part of a social group, or either because they are too engaged in social media they rarely make any efforts to interact with others cause them to have no real friends whatsoever.
Influence of social comparisons: Psychologists and researchers suggests that social media can have really bad impact on children's social and emotional development. Through social media they are likely to compare other's lives, choices and personalities with themselves. This might effect their self-confidence and their personalities on the whole. Their choices are determined upon proving themselves to other's as they are better than them. This increases the likelihood of decrease in healthy bonding with others, and also effects the mental health of the child. They feel anxious, nervous and their self-esteem gets affected.

Thus, children's social media involvement can have some major impacts on their social as well as emotional development. It could be risk factor for mental health problems.

How do social media platforms affect the social skills of children

Public Answer