New York Times “Why Are More American Teenagers Than Ever Suffering From Severe Anxiety?”

In the newspaper article from New York Times “Why Are More American Teenagers Than Ever Suffering From Severe Anxiety?”. Adolescents face a range of social and emotional challenges, such as starting to separate from their parents, gaining acceptance from their peers, and shaping their sense of identity. These changes will trigger anxiety. Eken suggested that the reason of this is because of social media “Anxious teenagers from all backgrounds are relentlessly comparing themselves with their peers, she said, and the results are almost uniformly distressing.”(Denizet, 2017, p.7) Although I agree with the point but as a teenager I also believe that the increment of population also affect teenagers’ anxiety. Since we all know that getting a job right away with a college degree is no longer an advantage compare to others. Most of the people around us has be in college, however, this also create an issue, that everyone become equivalent to others which also cause a high rate of competition. Parents started to expect their children to be as competitive as others and in order so, they forced more pressure on their children by adding classes, learn new talent, and keep telling them to work harder and harder. It also cause adult to ignore the problem that their children endure with not only pressure from parent and also social media.

Furthermore, a lot of children share their lives and expose to social media, they not only compare their appearance but also what they have and know. Teenager often worries about their appearance a lot which caused more issues when they are not as good as their peers. According to the news “Social media is a tool, but it’s become this thing that we can’t live without but that’s making us crazy.”(Denizet, 2017, p.7) We are living in a digital world where people rely on social media, we started tracking on other’s lives and we somehow thought those people’s lives that’s shown on social media are way more better than ours. Teenager’s anxiety is more severe than we think so, because it could indirectly cause further mental disorder. Anxiety also include the emotion of fear, based on that, people afraid that they will be eliminate by the society and they afraid they will be rejected by the peers. Teenagers are at the stage that exposes to vulnerability and because our education system is less humanize for us, social media are abused, it is hard for them to survive in this competitive world.

Reference: Denizet-lewis, B. (2017, October 11). Why Are More American Teenagers Than Ever Suffering From Severe Anxiety? Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/11/magazine/why-are-more-american-teenagers-than-ever-suffering-from-severe-anxiety.html