This's my niece, Stella. She's just turned one and starated to walk. ?And she's walking in that really cool way that one-year-olds do, a kind of teetering, my-body's-moving-too-fast-for-my-legs kind of way. It is absolutely gorgeous. And one of her favorite things to do at the moment is to stare at herself in the mirror. She absolutely loves her reflection. She giggles and squeals, and gives herself these big, wet kisses. It is beautiful.
Apparently, all of her friends do this and my mom tells me that I used to do this, and it got me thinking: When did I stop doing this? When is it suddenly not okay to love the way that we look? Because apparently we don't.
Ten thousand people every month google, "Am I ugly?" This is Faye. Faye is 13 and she lives in Denver. And like any teenager, she just wants to be liked and to fit in. It's Sunday night. She's getting ready for the week ahead at school. And she's slightly dreading it, and she's a bit confused because despite her mom telling her all the time that she's beautiful, every day at school, someone tells her that she's ugly. Because of the difference between what her mom tells her and what her friends at school, or her peers at school are telling her, she doesn't know who to believe. So, she takes a video of herself. she posts it to YouTube and she asks people to please leave a comment: "Am I pretty or am I ugly?" ?Well, so far, Faye has received over 13,000 comments. Some of them are so nasty, they don't bear thinking about.
This is an average, healthy-looking teenage girl receiving this feedback at one of the most emotionally vulnerable times in her life. Thousands of people are psting videos like this, mostly teenage girls, reaching out in this way. But what's leading them to do this? Well, today's teenagers?are rarely alone. They're under pressure to be online and available at all times, talking, messaging, liking, commenting, sharing, posting it never ends. Never before have we been so connected, so continuously, so instantaneously, so young. And as one mom told me, it's like there's a party in their bedroom every night.
There's simply no privacy. And social pressures that go along with that are relentless. This always-on environment is training our kids to value themselves based on the number of likes they get and the types of comments that they receive.There's no separation between online and offline life.What real or what isn't is really hard to tell the difference between. And it's also really hard to tell the difference between what's authentic and what's digitally manipulated. That she's beautiful.
(轉(zhuǎn)自TED演講流强，完全手打扶平，如有錯誤可以留言倦踢，會盡力改正）
