Parenting can be a polarising experience: whether it’s bottle or breast, gentle parenting vs 1970s style discipline, bedtimes, curfew – we all have our own view on how best to do things. But one area that garners very little debate is our kids’ use of social media.
The Conversative leader, Kemi Badenoch, has said she plans to ban under-16s from being able to access social media if her party comes to power. It would follow the lead of Australia, which became the first country last month to do just that. Badenoch also said she would try to implement a ban on smartphones in schools, explaining that while many parents want to stop their children using social media, they “don’t know how”. “Adults should be able to cope with that [the addictive nature of social media] and manage themselves. Children, we need to protect.”
I have a 12- and 15-year-old, who are rarely without their phones glued to their hands. Both have had them since the age of 11, something I now bitterly regret. At the time we were entirely in step with their peers and for context, over half of 8- to 11-year-olds in England currently have a mobile phone, while 97 per cent of 12-year-olds do.
I look at the slightly younger generation of parents – those whose children are in junior school; who have read the headlines about the dangers of phones; who watched Adolescence in horror; who have read Jonathan Haidt’s brilliant book, The Anxious Generation, which spells out the harms of a phone-based childhood – and feel envious.
We didn’t really know back then (my eldest daughter got her first phone in lockdown) about the harm we were exposing our children to, and I often feel like the digital canary down the mine. My own children have flown into the darkness, so the ones that come after us know better.
So, what is that darkness? Where to begin. My daughters and their friends have been messaged by boys in their year group and called the c-word (that’s not a generalisation – it seems to be mostly boys who use that word, usually with an appearance based adjective like “fat” or “lanky”). They’ve been sent unsolicited porn – my youngest was sent it via the class WhatsApp group in her first month of secondary school. She was 11.
WhatsApp is a blindspot among parents (few realise it has an age 13 rating) and it is not currently included in the social media ban in Australia due to being technically a messaging app. But it is a massive cause of problems and distractions. Most children get added to huge class WhatsApp groups. These ping through the night, often with silly nonsense, but sometimes with images of porn, swear words, or nastiness and bullying. Little wonder research in 2024 found one in six adolescents have experienced cyber bullying. According to the report, by the World Health Organisation, nearly one in five children in England aged 11 and over reported being cyber bullied at least once or twice in the past two months.
It’s for this reason I don’t let my daughters have their phone in their rooms overnight. Once, I left my youngest’s with her and was woken at 2am (on a school night) with the pinging of a particularly nasty spat on a school WhatsApp group.
Snapchat is another problem. The app has a Snap Map feature, where you can see where all your friends are in real time: not great at a time of life when a young person’s biggest worries is fitting in and being included. Similarly, it has a feature that allows you to select your eight best friends, who then get special emojis next to their names. The list can be updated regularly (have the creators never had to help a child navigate the bitchy dynamics of secondary school cliques?). Meanwhile, TikTok is full of influencers pushing cult clothing brands, or expensive (and unnecessary) skincare routines, which is why you see girls as young as 10 browsing hyaluronic acid and anti-ageing eye masks in Space NK.
After Badenoch’s interview, I asked my school parents WhatsApp group whether they supported a ban. Every single one said yes. “I think they should also govern what the social media platforms allow, and make them impose much stricter controls,” says one. “It shouldn’t just be down to the government – I’m sure the tech companies could do more.” “They certainly have the money and tech wizardry to make a ban on under-16s accessing social media work. They could make it safe at the point of use, rather than relying on clueless parents to try and impose controls on it. They just can’t be bothered, despite having a huge duty of care,” said another. “There’s a reason why social media bosses won’t allow their own children on these apps,” claimed another.The late Apple co-founder, Steve Jobs, once said in an interview his own children hadn’t used the iPad he created, explaining: “We limit how much technology our kids use at home”, while Microsoft founder, Bill Gates, didn’t let his own children have mobile phones until they were 14. In 2017, Mark Zuckerberg published a letter he wrote to his baby daughter where he implored her to “take time to smell all the flowers” and said “it’s important to go outside and play”. The Meta founder (who owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) then added, “Childhood is magical, you only get to be a child once”.
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Ain’t that the truth. I just wish my own children’s childhoods – and those of their friends – hadn’t been affected by the beast of social media that Zuckerberg and his Silicon Valley cronies have unleashed upon an unsuspecting world. Thankfully, we’re getting smarter to it.
Daisy Greenwell and her friend Clare Fernyhough set up the Smartphone Free Childhood movement, which encourages parents to form class WhatsApp support groups where they all agree not to normalise giving very young children phones, waiting until they’re at least 16. “For a long time parents have normalised this online world their children inhabit, which I compare to smoke slowly entering a building and nobody realising it until the harm is done,” says Greenwell.
Now we know the harm, let’s stop the smoke coming in – and ban social media for under-16s.
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