A bit about me

Hi, I’m Emma and I’m 14 years old. I’m so pleased that I’ve been Elected as a Member of Somerset Youth Parliament!

In my free time I like to play football, netball, and have fun doing road marching!

I’m part of our school debate club. I’ve just started a Leadership role.

Personal statement

Social media is a key part of most teenagers’ lives but peer pressure and cyberbullying means it’s easy for teenagers to feel upset and have unhealthy thoughts and feelings. That’s why I think it’s so important that we start promoting more positive use of social media to help reduce the rising mental health cases.

Most importantly I will centre my campaign around what young people think.

I believe that

• Youth voice is the most important device that Somerset should use to help improve our county for teenagers and all young people’s voices are important and should be listened to with respect, no matter our opinions
• Anything affecting young people should have youth voice involved to insure that all results are accurate and adapted to suit teenagers of today
• That mental health problems are increasing, and we should be doing all we can to help reduce these numbers and that every teenager in Somerset should have access to help and resources to support them if required; whether they are flyers, forums and apps like Tellmi, Kooth or someone to talk to

Objectives

I will:

• create a countywide survey to find out how young people really think social media is effecting their mental health. From this I will draw conclusions to see what the most affected areas are to help focus my campaign
• research social media and its impact on mental health
• make links with organisations to gather information on current support services, advice and information which is available locally for young people to access
• create a presentation for Somerset schools to raise awareness about the negative impacts of social media. This will include and promote links to services along with resources such as posters to put around your school
• finalise my term in office by creating a report of everything that I have completed