Social Media and Fear of Missing Out in Adolescents: The Role of Family Characteristics
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The article I was interested in and read was Social Media and Fear of Missing Out in Adolescents: The Role of Family.
The article describes the phenomenon of FoMO, Fear of Missing Out, in conjunction with its effects on adolescents, and the family environment (Bloemen & De Coninck, 2020). Today’s adolescents love to stay connected, letting others see what they are doing and enjoy seeing what the others are doing (Barry & Wong, 2020). Not being able to do this can cause FoMO, this study looks into how the family structure and parenting styles can attribute to this phenomenon.
The data was gathered from 831 students aged 13-18 via online surveys. The main hypotheses that the study set out to prove or disprove was that intact families-families with high quality relationships between parents and children will see less FoMO in adolescents than in non-intact families. This was thought because in non-intact families there is a tendency for adolescents to be online more, with less adult supervision and that the greatest preventers of FoMo are the trust and communication between parents and their teens (Bloemen & De Coninck, 2020).
The study went on to disprove this hypotheses finding that there was more FoMO in intact families than in non-intact families one reason for this was that although teens from non-intact families may spend more time on line and have less parental supervision they have more social supports from outside the family as well as being more easily adaptive to personal independence, thus seeing less FoMO (Bloemen & De Coninck, 2020).
When I started reading the article I believed that it would find that the adolescents that were from intact families would suffer less from FoMo because they would have the chance of greater parental support. I was only slightly surprised to see that the opposite was true but could understand this finding as in my own case I found myself a single mother of a 12 year old and know that there is support if you want to look and my son was not on the screen continually as he was not even allowed a phone until he was 17 so his online time was very limited, even at 21 the last post he made on social media was back in June 2020 and he does not find he needs or misses out.
References
Bloemen, N., & De Coninck, D. (2020). Social Media and Fear of Missing Out in Adolescents: The Role of Family Characteristics. Social Media + Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120965517
Barry, C. T., & Wong, M. Y. (2020). Fear of missing out (FoMO): A generational phenomenon or an individual difference? Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 37(12), 2952–2966. https://doi.org/10.1177/0265407520945394
I made the same assumption when reading the article. I assumed adolescences from intact families would suffer less from fear of missing out. I do wonder what the habits of the parents are and whether that has an impact on fear of missing out and social media use.
Easy assumption to make you would think that teens from intact families would be more adaptable just goes to show you can’t tell a book by its cover
Personally I am not surprised by the findings, I myself have come from an intact family and am now in a intact family of my own. But I know that in my own instance, even as an adult, I get that jealous ‘FoMo feeling’ when I see posts from friends of similar ages, who are out buying their 3rd property, and traveling Australia in their decked out caravan, while I am still renting and saving away to go on holiday for 5 days. My brothers however, who are both now in non-intact families are happy to just go with flow and are happy with their lot.
Yes so very true once I really thought about it in conjunction with my children and them being in a non intact family it does not surprise me but before I read the article my thoughts were that the opposite would be true