The scholastic year is set to start and, aside from the traffic issues that this will bring about, there are other considerations that need to be made.

One of them is with regard to social media, and how this is affecting the behaviour of students, teachers and parents.

In an interview with this media house, University lecturer Jonathan Borg, highlighted the influence that social media has on behaviour in schools.

Describing it as a "delicate issue", Borg said that social media makes it harder for schools to create an environment that is respectful and that promotes responsibility.

Well, it must be said that it is not only in schools that "behaviour" is affected by what goes on in the social media. Being "connected" has changed the world in the last decades, and although social media has its good points, it has many other negative effects on society.

For one thing, people seem to be glued to their phone. There was a time when, in the landlines era, phones were affixed to a wall. Nowadays, phones are affixed to people's hands, with many oblivious to their surroundings while scrolling up and down their mobile devices. It is sometimes sad to see people sitting around a table, not exchanging a word but simply checking what others have posted on Facebook, Instagram and elsewhere.

To go back to schools, and therefore young people who are still to mature, the social media has an even more direct effect on them. They are at an age where they are highly influenced by their peers and if, in the past, this was restricted to their school colleagues, this is now open to all over - not only people of similar age living in the same country, but millions of others living around the world.

Added to this, young people are now exposed to the "adult" world much earlier in life, given that mobile phones, computers and social media accounts give them access to it so openly. Considering that many, including adults, use social media in all wrong ways imaginable, then it is easy to understand why the young people of today are so easily influenced by all that is posted online.

This inevitably affects their behaviour in their social life, being at school or elsewhere. And, given that there is a general downward trend in terms of what respect and responsibility mean, the behaviour of students in schools is not what it used to be in the past. This is also compounded by the way parents sometimes behave when their children are punished for wrongdoing. In the past, a punishment at school meant a punishment at home; these days, there are parents who defend their children's wrongdoing, with several instances which escalate to verbal or physical confrontation between parents and teachers.

We cannot turn the clock back. Social media is part and parcel of who we are, and it is here to stay. The best thing we can do is try to teach the younger generations the difference between what is good and what is bad for them on social media. It is only in this way that we can hope that social media can influence them in a good way.