Parents - we need to do something drastic, don't we??

[BrianOfBritain]

Another report about the huge number of teens with mental health problems in the press today. So many of the adolescents I know are anxious, low, self-harming, self-loathing, etc. And almost all the parents - myself included - think phones and social media are partly to blame. But instead of changing it much, we all struggle on with them, saying "well, I'd better let him/her, or he/she won't have any friends" or whatever. We look to systems of online protection to "keep them safe". But this won't even scratch the surface, I suspect. Why are we putting up with/going along with this? I seriously think we might need some kind of revolution, where thousands - millions - of parents act together, pethaps to get rid of smart phones for kids altogether. Millions all going back to old style non-smart tech, all at once so kids are in it together and won't be left out?

Of course the technocracy have more and more ways to get us - and more importantly our kids - most and more hooked. But if we acted together, surely we could step away from it on behalf of our kids. Surely we can do SOMETHING? I suspect it may have to be drastic, to try to turn this juggernaut. Are there any initiatives to get lots and lots of us together to sort this? Is there even any appetite for it?? I just feel like we're passively allowing our kids to be so harmed, and assume we're powerless when we're not...

I agree wholeheartedly. I am also really pleased to read @Goldenbear comments - it’s refreshing to hear.

Interesting re: pathologising shyness etc. DH & I discuss this a lot. The amount of children with anxiety - when some anxiety is normal. It’s not normal to be perfectly happy all the time. We all feel sad and anxious and angry and joyful and relieved and uncertain. These are all normal emotions.

urrrgh46 · Yesterday 14:53
Personally don't think it's phones or social
Media that's the problem. Imo it's schools, exams, too little control in their own lives and expectations around their future - university etc that leads to poor mental health.

The social media stuff is a red herring. When the rest of a teens life is beyond their control they'll look to control the bits they can and this is where social media comes into it. They'll look to be most popular, fit in, "find their tribe" - all things that involve social media.

If young people had more control of their own environment in the first place - school uniform, less pressure of exams, more choice of what to study, how to study and when to study and even if to study - along with real feelings that there is something beyond school that doesn't make them a failure if they don't get the "right" number of exams then there would be far fewer young people with mental ill health.

wow this exactly !!!

One thing that never gets enough airtime in these discussions is the fact that the outlook for this generation of teenagers is bleak. Truly bleak.
They see the parents struggling to make ends meet and bring in a wage commensurate to their sacrifices, the opportunities for self-development come with a huge price tag and debt burden, and then they see those vacuous plastic celebrities and “influencers” (and gaslighting MPs and Ladies like Bra Baronee Moone raking in millions when peoples lives were hanging in the balance) get promoted and what passes as success and status in our consumeristic society because of their backsides, cup size or biceps size, hair extensions and veneers.
get your children off social media if possible by all means but more importantly stop competitive parenting, invest in transferable skills and emotional well-being, teach them the value of being good morally upright people and engaged citizens so they can change the world for the better.

urrrgh46 · Yesterday 14:53
Personally don't think it's phones or social
Media that's the problem. Imo it's schools, exams, too little control in their own lives and expectations around their future - university etc that leads to poor mental health

But those issues have been around for several generations now.

Yes, yes, yes, everything that urrrgh46 said.

And to add to this, the amount of young people who are actually neurodivergent and go undiagnosed for years - or rejected an assessment instead and parents gaslit instead. There is currently a 3 year waiting list for this assessment and many then get rejected the assessment as school says all is fine. It's a recipe for great difficulty for so many young people and their families.

My 13 and 15 yo DS’ do not have FB, IG, SC or TT… you are the parent and sometimes you have to make unpopular decisions- if you’re worried about DC’s mental health then perhaps as a parent take responsibility and do something

My first MN thread was asking about not allowing DD her phone in her room. I was savaged. I did it anyway. No tech upstairs until they were 18. She thanks me all the time.

theres so many reasons but startling one for me and my teen.

I had a plethora of music subculture tribes I could latch on to to find myself. They were all completely self absorbed and fantastic in they allowed us to grow and figure out what fit. I got to be a goth and a nerd and arty type etc.

what do kids have these days? Social justice and rights groups mark their identity more than anything.

you’re pro whatever and have to be selfless to the cause or face being ostracised so there’s no real way to grow or explore or figure out if that fits them. Teens need to be (reasonably!) selfish as they grow.

look at how vegans are treated when they decided that veganism isn’t helping them and/or contributing to disordered eating and orthorexia. There’s no allowance at all for trying new things as teens when every identity is around rights or morals rather than just being edgy and fun.

I thought an indication of future mental health stems from children’s upbringing in the first 5 years of life.
The Princess if Wales is doing a lot to promote these early years. This is when the brain is developing rapidly and when resilience is formed.

Please do. I have a 6mo.

Would love for this to be sorted by the time I have this issue.

Oh for the days of the old Nokia’s

Your post is spot on OP. Mr DD at the age of 14 suddenly and inexplicably became ill -

• Panic attacks - and I had no idea what they were
• Chronic fatigue syndrome
• Abject avoidance and fear of people her own age.

Horrendous. She's 21 now and feels suicidal. She has stopped self harming, but it all stems from a few small incidents that got blown up via social media - one of which was her so called friend pushing her so hard she fell over a bench and hurt herself and the school did nothing!

Blackberries were the phone to have in the 00s and I wish we'd stuck with them for friends to message each other. It was controlled and helpful.

Social media has just helped a load of vicious people with socipathic or narcissistic tendencies and their followers to abuse other people from afar.

@Suprima this is interesting to hear about and sounds like a good balance (maybe except the moving to a v rural area, which I don't think I'd personally want to do, but we have countryside almost on our doorstep anyway). Do you know what kind of resources your friends use to teach the practical computing skills? I want to do similar with DC, but we are not techy ourselves and I want to make sure they don't miss out on vital IT skills.

Keeping education centers as phone free spaces..
Of course allow phones before and after school but during school,unless very exceptional circumstances.... locked away.

It's madness that some schools allow them. They may have " rules" in place but there often isn't consistently or the will.

Devices are a major issue imo. It put keeps childten in echo an chamber of negative content. Be it news about the war, body issues, over sexualized content, environmental dooming news. And it's near impossible to disconect. Social media, youtube and even news websites are designed to keep you scrolling endlesly. If it's hard for adults to resist what chance do kids have?

Kids have parents that need to put boundaries in place

@PancakesNotPlainFlour,

Agree with you but many kids will refuse to leave the house because they are so attracted zombiefied by the devices.

I don't know what the solution is but the Internet content might need a rethink

I'm going to sound self righteous here, sorry, but I didn't allow screen time for either of my children.
To be fair , tablets weren't mainstream, but I'd I never allowed my children to play on a phone. We didn't get a PlayStation until my youngest was 12. Even then it was an older version.
Screen time was not allowed during a school week.
And no, they weren't miserable or felt that they'd been denied anything. It wasn't mainstream.

When I did gate duty at a primary school, my heart sank at the number of mums , yes mums!, who'd schlep down the path to their infant children's classes , glued to their phones . Only to see the same mums, schlepping back up , still glued to their phones and shushing their little children who were desperately trying to regale their day.

Oh , and the number of children who couldn't sustain a prolonged piece of writing... frightening.

Phones in schools is not the issue it is made out to be most schools have policies around phone usage and it would be difficult to spend long periods of time in lessons on phones. The vast majority of time online is at home yet parents are calling in schools to fix this when they give their kids 24/7 access 🤯

Yes! Well said.

Who is the author please? Thanks !

Like it or not we’ve lived through a digital revolution and our kids are the first generation to not remember a time before the internet/smart phones etc. If they’re not taught to use tech properly then they’ll struggle in their adult lives. It scares us because they’re often more tech savvy than us and so we feel on the back foot and powerless.

Perhaps social media has lead to an increase in awareness of MH and people are more likely to recognise mental ill health because of it? In my teenage years I had friends and peers with eating disorders, self harming, on antidepressant medication, attempting suicide, sectioned. It just wasn’t talked about and people viewed it as ‘attention seeking’ Lots of friends engaged in risky behaviours that young people today are much less interested in. Perhaps these kind of behaviours were as a result of unrecognised poor emotional well-being? Young people were to be controlled rather than understood and empathised with.

Every generation has a moral panic about something the younger generations are doing and likes to point the finger at some new fangled thing they don’t understand…this is them whipped up into more of a frenzy by the media. Child and adolescent mental health is far more nuanced and has many different causes than just pointing fingers at social media and smart phones.

@Noangelbuthavingfun Abigail Shrier. It’s an excellent read. My copy is dog eared and highlighted.

Not true.

whenever we get a new piece of tech it takes us 3 days to master it. Kids are the same. Ever seen a Steiner educated child use their first tablet or phone? By day 3 they’ve mastered it.

Also, how many young people actually had a smart phone in 2007 when this decline in mental health happened? I remember they cost an absolute bomb and ownership was very few and far between. Ive worked in adolescent mental health and there’s very little hard data that evidences a link. It’s impossible to research properly because there isn’t enough of a control group of young people who’ve never had access to the internet/social media to do large scale, credible research on this.

"Social media is so terrible that I am going to make an appeal on Social media about how everyone should get off of Social media!" says OP, posting on social media (ie MN).