Ellen Goodman Family Counterculture Analysis

Do you think today’s culture has produced “an increasingly hostile environment”? If so, you concur with Ellen Goodman, the author of Family Counterculture. In Goodman’s literary piece, she urges parents to “counter the culture” because prevailing cultural norms are taking young children by storm, and not in a positive way. Goodman focuses on subtle ways in which the media influences children; one being food. However, I will discuss the more popular, yet unfortunate ways in which social media negatively influences children of this generation.
Today’s children are no strangers to social media. Most social media platforms such as Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook requires everyone to be at least 13 years or older before creating an account. However, there are many children below the age of 13 that change their birth year in order to successfully create an account. Thus, being exposed to the world of social media at such a young age can open a ‘can of worms’ called insecurity. Insecurities can immensely change the way a child views his or her abilities, appearance, and personality.
According to the National Eating Disorder Association website, 47% of elementary school girls said

pictures of models makes them want to lose weight. Young females often think they must be thin in order to be beautiful because there are photos on Instagram of thin women who by no surprise are receiving a great deal of attention. By nature a young girl will long for the acceptance and the praise the female in the photo is receiving; thus, their perception of themselves and the meaning of beauty will be distorted. A young girl may believe that she must be slim in order to get attention. As a result, many young girls develop an eating disorder or Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD) because they feel “they’re just not pretty enough”. BDD specifically will make the sufferer’s vision of himself or herself obscured; one will think oneself is overweight when in actuality one is underweight or malnourished.
Moreover, social media has managed to separate society in accordance to what we deem as beautiful women. On social media, most of the society coin olive skin and lengthy hair as the definition of beauty thus excluding those with melanated skin and coily hair. This is an issue because there is an overwhelming amount of young black boys and young black girls that are embarrassed by their skin color because they think it’s hindering them from being seen as handsome or beautiful when in fact they already are. Interestingly, I stumbled upon an article on the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund website that overviewed the Doll Test—first performed in the 1940s by psychologists, Kenneth and Mamie Clark, but has been imitated for years since then. The experiment is typically conducted with children of young ages who must identify the race of two different dolls (one being white and the other black) and explicitly state which doll they’d prefer. The results frequently show that children (from a variety of backgrounds) often prefer and assign positive characteristics to the white doll or to a doll with a fair skin tone. The results are saddening because since young children are so vulnerable, society is indirectly influencing the way young children view themselves. Thankfully, there are powerful and influential men and women, including myself, that are encouraging and spreading self-love throughout the black community whether it’d be in their everyday lives or on a blog.
One of the most unfortunate things that stem from social media use amongst young children is the increase in cyber bullying.

Young children along with adults use the Internet as a doorway to push around or intimidate someone else of a different race, gender, sexual orientation, and religion or even sometimes for an unknown reason. According to DoSomething.org, approximately 43% of kids have been bullied online and nearly 75% of students admit they have used the Internet as a way to bash another student. One of the most horrific ways children deal with cyber bullying is by taking their own life. Hundreds of families each year loses their younger son, daughter, brother, sister, cousin, niece, nephew or dear friend because of the malicious, yet often disingenuous regretted words typed by

others.
Furthermore, social media has prevented parents from being their children’s immediate source of learning. Children are now more likely to be influenced by friends and celebrities for guidance. Thus, since the media has become over-sexualized in the past decade, young children are following suit. Young children and adolescents are becoming sexually active and are putting themselves at risk for STDs and pregnancy. Also, social media ensues peer pressure. Children feel obligated to conform to ‘the culture’ that forces them to leave behind their morals and values their parents have tried to instill in them. Social media is a space for young children to think for themselves, and this is what parents should be worried about. Most children aren’t mature enough to understand that in life there is something called a natural consequence—every decision they make will have a consequence and the way in which the consequence affects them will determine whether they believe the consequence was positive or negative.
To conclude, in Family Counterculture, Ellen Goodman issues a call to action for parents to stop allowing society’s culture raise their children because the culture is detrimental to their development. However, Goodman doesn’t mention some of the most crucial effects culture has on children such as the dissolution of self-image, self-worth, and cyber bullying. We must counter the culture and not allow social media to consume our lives and minds because there’s more to life than just photos, likes, and comments; there’s life itself.