I know that the majority of my peer group are furiously conversing (online) in favour of denying children the benefits of smartphones. But as a parent of two, I also know that so much of parenting is about trusting your gut. So I have an innate, visceral aversion to the idea of banning under-16s from the flawed, but essential, world of social media.
Keir Starmer is overtly hinting at an Australia-style ban, while a House of Lords vote this week could see a motion in this direction attached to a key bill. Yet, if any of my kids wanted to keep discreetly using social media after a ban, I’d probably help them flout the law regardless.
If that sounds shocking, remember – we constantly give kids access to apps that aren’t intended for children. Spotify, Duolingo, YouTube, even BBC Bitesize or iPlayer are all meant to be for over-13s.
To be very clear, I would never zealously foist social media on them. In fact, my 11-year-old is part of a noticeable cohort that have grown up amidst so much trepidation and alarm around phones that they are noticeably nonplussed (trend experts are tentatively dubbing Gen Alpha as an “unplugging” generation).
This, plus the Government’s recent success in curbing Elon Musk’s Grok makes a ban feel unnecessary and unambitious. The moonshot should really be a clean-up of social media for all. I agree with Ian Russell, the father of Molly Russell who took her life aged 14 after being bombarded with self-harm content – he calls techniques like bans a “sledgehammer”. Similarly, Australian teen campaigner Noah Jones advocates for “safeguards, not silence”.
But that’s all just politics. Call me selfish but I don’t want to pretend to my kids that social media isn’t frequently awesome. If I sensed that my kids wanted to use it for the right reasons, I’d enable that as much as I could because I believe in the good of social media. Like suddenly being told to light fires with flint in an age of matches, I’m worried British kids will soon be left cruelly grasping the tools they need to meet some basic, modern human needs.
One of those needs is for community and connectedness. Even the most agitated parent will acknowledge that the white heat of adolescent communication isn’t simply engineered by social media companies. It’s in all of us at that age to work out who we are by talking non-flipping-stop.
I’m not blasé about the many ways that teen exchanges online can go horrifically wrong. But sometimes I worry that parents just feel so disconnected from it all that the ban is about their own insecurities as much as anything.
I believe in the value of talking – any talking – being positive. We habitually admonish boys in particular for their inability to open up, yet want to take away a medium that enables regular conversation, both private and also public. I worry too that it’s the marginalised who will suffer the most.
I look in particular to friends’ kids with disabilities who find communities of people online who are in similar life situations. The support they find online is both life-giving and essential. I worry that kids who use social media in a calm, sensible and responsible way will be the ones that suffer most.
My other worry is about awareness and apathy. We live amidst vanishing libraries, underfunded factual TV and documentaries, and inaccessible media. Against that backdrop, we can’t ignore that social media is a valuable tool to learn about the world beyond our neighbourhoods; to learn about lives, views and experiences beyond our own.
Labour laudably honoured a manifesto commitment to give the vote to 16-year olds. Yet what are kids going to know about the world, beyond what their parents tell them to think? Are we not forgetting that most young people get their news from apps; that social media is basically “the media” now.
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Beyond the fact that access to the fourth estate is a quasi-enshrined fundament of democracy, don’t we have a moral duty to connect kids to the world they’re about to inherit? Many of us found our political footing way before 16. Watching the poll tax riots on the news changed my life aged 10. Nigel Farage cites being “dazzled” by seeing Enoch Powell talk at his school. By 16, Keir Starmer was doorstepping for East Surrey Young Socialists.
It’s hard to care if you’re not aware. To find out about atrocities in Gaza, to understand why the concept of “small boats” creates big political problems, most kids rely on social media, not a broadsheet. What message are we sending when we take away their source of knowledge? It sets the uncomfortable precedent that if a type of media is not up to snuff, then we can just ban it. But where do we draw that line? If social media is so terrible, why do we even let adults consume it?
My view might be obnoxiously rose-tinted, but social media has been really good to me over the years. I owe it a huge debt for enabling new friendships, romances, mentors, heroes and job opportunities over the years. I trust my kids and want to give them the same opportunities as me. Is that so wrong?
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