Positive and Negative effects of Social media on Family time| Dr. Amrita Vohra

Cell phones have also evolved into powerful machines that can be used to socialize with people around the globe. These technological services were mostly introduced to help make human life better and they did that to a great extent.

Do Cell Phones and Social Media Make Family Relationships Stronger? How do cell phones and social media have a positive impact on family relations? How cell phones and social media have a negative impact on family relations? Why Too Much Cell Phone Usage Can Hurt Your Family Relationships?
There are many types of relationships that people develop over time, and the most important by far is the ‘family relationship’, of course. It is here that the impact of social media can be seen the most. Earlier, families would bond over face-to-face conversations that would be had with one another when everybody was done with their day’s work and were at home, unwinding. These days, families barely greet one another, and everyone is engrossed in their own news posts on their own social media accounts. Watching videos, reacting to posts online and responding to friends seems to have become more important than even saying hello to one another. Below we discuss some further effects that social media has on family relationships.

1. Positive Impact
Here are some ways that social media can positively impact family relationships:

• One of the most positive effects of social media on marriage is that couples who spend a lot of time away from each other can keep in touch with each other and feel closer to the other despite the distance.
• Couples are better able to get to know their other friends and social circles since social media feeds make it easier to see what a person gets up to and the things they like doing. It often makes them feel closer to each other despite having become friends only recently.
• As the case often is, children grow up, go to college and start their own lives. In cases like this, it is easier for parents to keep in touch with their children through the help of social media. With the ability to video chat and share pictures and so on, families who live away from one another are able to close that distance, even if only through cyberspace.
• With the ability to share locations and tag people, families can often share locations of favourite restaurants, family moments and outings and generally have a place to keep all their happy and fond memories.
• If both parents and children have seen the same posts on their social media, they can have conversations about it and can bond over other things they may share or enjoy on social media such as favourite pages that cater to certain hobbies like crafts, cooking, and others.
• Brings about a sense of security since everyone knows that they can get in touch with different people at any time if they need to.

 Negative Impact
Here are some ways that social media negatively impacts family relationships:

• Social media has the ability to become very addictive. Most people find it has become a compulsion for them to check their phones every few minutes to see if they have any new notifications. In fact, the addiction is so real and so strong that it has been found that people experience the same kind of withdrawal symptoms as a drug addict if they are unable to check their social media.
• The compulsive checking of social media has made face-to-face communication very difficult. Family members may communicate with each other online or on social media rather than talk to each other. A husband and wife may spend time next to each other, but their minds are engrossed in their own social entertainment as they scroll through their individual feeds. This is one of the negative effects of social media on marriage in its earliest stages.
• As people tend to only post the best parts of their lives on social media, it can be very easy to imagine that that is what their lives are always like. This can sometimes lead to making families or couples very unhappy with their own lives and situations.