10 year olds who are teenagers already

Or how social media and smartphones are creating havoc

I know that it might be rich that I talk about social media having a detrimental impact on mental health (as someone who has been on Instagram for over 10 years now). However now the evidence is mounting up (I’m not going to cite all the studies but you’ve probably heard about them). It’s not just social media however. It’s also smartphones in general. It’s also the arguments they create in families. So you have the stress of the child who wants access and the stress of the parent who is continually pushing back, trying to hold it at bay for as long as they can.

The reason I’ve started to get interested in this topic is personal. I have two kids- both girls and the eldest is 10 years old. I sort of see myself as a fairly relaxed parent (my daughters don’t see me like this). Recently however I’ve come under a lot of pressure because so many of my daughter’s friends have access to smartphones, some got their phones in Year 4 already (aged 8). I don’t know why they needed them as none of them walk to and from school alone at that age but it happened.

The fall out of them having access to these phones has been universally negative. I haven’t heard one parent or teachers saying that a kid having a smartphone has added something positive overall (beyond the safety aspect i.e. being able to call their parent if they need to).

At the moment 80% of the arguments we have at home are about what my older daughter is allowed to do online. She is highly emotional (which I understand as I was the same at that age), and she continually feels like we are being unfair and that she’ll be left behind because she doesn’t have a phone yet.

WhatsApp in particular has been really damaging to the friendships in my daughter’s class.

The girls aren’t yet fully equipped with an understanding of the impact an ill-thought out message can have on another kid. If you call someone a 'bitch,’ then it’s bad but if you do it on a phone, then others can join in, and the word sits there so it can be revisited time and time again.

The school is constantly catching the fall out of girls coming in on Monday, having arguments and drama, usually as a result of messages that have been flying back and forth over the weekend.

Some of the girls are on TikTok and post videos on their public profiles slagging one another off. Sometimes they’re doing mock gang signs that they’ve seen other kids do. One girl wrote about how she hated the sleepover she’d had at another girl’s house. It’s triggering and makes you want to nail wooden blanks to the door, get supplies in, cut off all Wifi and just live like hobbits for the foreseeable.

All of us can see that the girls are growing up more quickly. That they’re wearing make up (tutorials), interested in skincare (expensive and unnecessary), chanting lyrics that have loads of swear words in and are about inflicting violence on one another…the list goes on. It’s pretty clear.

Again it comes back to this…is there positive stuff coming in too? Not at the moment, not much at all in fact (okay they probably build connections, I get that, and certainly once you’re older and understand how people lose their temper and write stuff they don’t mean…maybe).

It feels like we’re in a boat, there’s a leak letting all this content in and just when I've plugged in one hole, another hole emerges. My daughter isn’t allowed a phone (she hates me for this). She isn’t allowed on WhatsApp (she hates me for this too). She isn’t allowed on Tik Tok but finds work arounds so will go on my partner’s phone and quickly reload the app. I am most definitely the bad guy in the parenting duo as she screams how much she hates me, how she is isolated because she is the only one without a phone (she isn’t) and how she wants more freedom.

I can see now how challenging parenting is (not the first time of course), and why mums always say that it gets tougher as they get older but is different. The decisions become difficult and the peer pressure is enormous. As a parent of a toddler I was exhausted but at least I could control what was coming in a bit more - CBeebies mainly via an iPad or the TV.

As I write this I am sat on my laptop, my daughter furious after she discovered me deleting Tik Tok from my partner’s phone. Her fury is real. I get it. I am once again the anti-fun police. I told her that I understood how disappointed she was. That I would take that fury head on. That I would talk to her when she was more reasonable. I also told her that I would try and keep her safe, that I had her best interests at heart but know all of that stuff falls on deaf ears.

Your parents become increasingly uncool and irrelevant, the barriers to fun and freedom- this usually happens in the teenage years though right?

‘It’s so unfair,’ she screamed at the top of her lungs, ‘You were allowed so much more freedom when you were my age. Your parents didn't check what you were doing. They didn’t even know where you were.’

This was true. It was a different time. We didn't have eyes that were glued to our phones. We didn't have content that wasn’t going to make us feel good pumped into our eyes. There were other dangers for sure (a stranger groped me on my way to school - so quickly that I questioned whether it had even happened, a man stood naked at the window as I passed each day, and I felt unsafe but didn’t tell anyone as thought it was my fault in some weird way).

I want to be at a stage where she understands that all this stuff is so hard to navigate. I know this time will come eventually.

‘God we argued a lot back then,’ she’ll say, ‘It was a terrible time.’

I hope she’ll understand that I did what I thought was right, that I was just trying to keep us safe, that I didn't want to be alarmist but at the same time, had a deep sense that none of this was right for her.

I hope she’ll understand a bit more what it was like.