My 14-year-old daughter is years away from being legally allowed to work full-time, but she has two “jobs”.
One is as a babysitter; the other is for me. She puts all our unwanted clothes and too-small items on Vinted and eBay and keeps the proceeds as pocket money. She’s not making a fortune, by any stretch (£3 for a pair of used tracksuit bottoms, anyone?), but over the past couple of months she’s made about £100, which she’s putting towards buying Christmas presents.
But not for much longer. Now, thanks to the government’s social media ban – spearheaded by Keir Starmer and set to come into force in March next year – the two shopping sites are reportedly set to be proscribed. They will become the latest no-go areas for under-16s online, joining the likes of Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube.
The culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, has said she is “looking seriously” at expanding the original ban to include the retail websites “in order to keep children safe” – with a particular worry regarding the platforms’ inbuilt messaging systems.
The fear is, presumably, chat functions that let strangers message adolescents selling an old football kit for a tenner could be misappropriated and abused by adults who are intent on grooming innocent kids. I get it. If you look for the very worst in humanity, particularly online, you’ll find it.
But it also all leaves me – a parent with helicopter tendencies who hates it when the teens say they’re going to “hang out” in the park in the evening and don’t have somewhere specific to go – with one despairing question. Where is safe for kids these days? Anywhere? Please write in with your suggestions, because I can’t think of any.
It’s not local community centres, because they’ve either been closed due to funding cuts or never existed in the first place. It’s not the high streets or public parks, particularly in my part of East London, where stabbings and gangs and fights and muggings are a constant worry. Just a few months ago, a friend’s 12-year-old son had his phone stolen on the street outside school by two older boys; they said they had a knife and would use it if he didn’t hand it over. I’ve had to have that conversation with my kids: always, always hand it over.
But if IRL hang-outs aren’t safe, especially after dark, and nothing online is deemed safe either – even Roblox, which my 10-year-old son is obsessed with, is dogged with controversy about predators using it to groom children – aren’t we cultivating a sense of fear in our kids that everything is off limits and everyone is out to get them? How do we expect them to practice being independent?
I agree with taking precautions to keep children safe from harm. But I don’t agree with creating a world that’s underpinned with anxiety, where every single adult – neighbours, teachers, someone trying to buy a £1 T-shirt – is viewed with suspicion and distrusted. I don’t think that’s the halcyon, fear-free childhood any of us want for our kids.
No, what I think is much more effective is transparency, actually. To talk to our kids about the dangers and the risks, about what’s appropriate conversation and what isn’t, and to teach them how to use sites like eBay and Vinted – in the open, without secrecy. To flag up anything that makes them uncomfortable. And then work really hard to keep that two-way, parent-child dialogue completely open in case anything does go wrong.
I want to send my children out into the world with knowledge about how to keep themselves safe, to earn some pocket money, to flog their old toys – but not to destroy their faith in people at the same time.
I want them to know that sure, there’s a malevolent anomaly, a tiny minority of evil people who might try to take advantage and want to hurt them, but that’s by far the exception – not the norm. To remind them that people are mostly good. Mostly kind. That “mostly” – to quote the gorgeous poem “Small Kindnesses” by Danusha Laméris – “we don’t want to harm each other”.
And I know it’s on me, as a parent, to show them that I trust them, rather than coddling them in cotton wool and stopping them from living (or earning a bit of money for sweets, at least).
The chances are, overwhelmingly, that they’ll be just fine. They might even end up better off.
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