To wholeheartedly agree with Brianna Ghey’s mother

[Moonpig82]

I spotted this article this morning. We personally do not allow Tik Tok, Insta, Facebook, Snapchat. For our eldest who has just got a phone when starting Year 7. However we have succumbed to whatsapp.

What are people’s thoughts? How can we ‘police’ our children’s phones?

Or AIBU and there is no policing for social media? I know my Year 7 child’s friends do have these apps. Not all of them though.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-68193103

It's not difficult to be tech free. Parks are free, sports clubs and scouting/cadets are cost effective activities, gardening at home or community spaces is free too... That's before we look at the indoor activities kids can help with like drawing, reading, cooking (not even baking just helping make dinner), DIY, housework, blanket forts, Lego, Meccano etc etc.

In the 90's it was violent video games and 'video nasties' that caused kids to hurt and murder eachother until research was done which showed otherwise. Think of the number of children who access the Internet who do NOT hurt or murder anybody. There's something wrong with the children who did this, same as there is with adults who murder people.

Under 16s phones are unworkable as a solution. The social media companies need to be compelled by law to police their platforms more carefully.

Agree completely with this. If you deny them tech, they will be the kids at parties glued to tech as soon as they go to someone’s home or a sleepover. As you say, better to build up confidence of speaking up when something’s not right and knowing that they never give out personal information etc. Get them to stick to small Whats App groups with close friends and get to know friends parents. Make sure you have access to the phone and just keep on eye on what is being written.

I used to phone friends on the landline at the weekend - time and technology has moved on and they Whats App each other these days. Its making sure kids use it sensibly that matters.

The point of supervision and checking isn't to bring the risk for everyone down to 0. That would never work, it doesn't work with anything else . The point of it is to be aware, have conversations with your kid, keep an eye on what's going and in reality to buy time for those lessons and conversations to sink in and their brains to mature some more. Simply by making it slightly more difficult, rather than at their fingertips will deter some kids(can't be arsed) or at least postpone it for a while.

All the runarounds you mention do involve planning and resources. Having the money,the friends who would be willing,the know how . They're not impossible to find, but it's not easily accessible on a whim either.

DD atm can't download anything on her phone without my permission because it's linked to my account and it requires the password every time . A password she doesn't know. I mean sure, she could have a friend willing and knowledgeable enough to have those apps and then transfer them to her phone. I'm open to that possibility, but in my opinion that's less of a risk than her having full access to anything and everything, or no access at all so having to hide ,lie and find all the runarounds.

Guessing you're quite young! I had a job from 13 until 32 with no smart phone. I used to commute by train for 5 years pre smart phone. My dad still has no smart phone and commutes by train.

I support her 100% none of my children have a phone or access to social media. I have one in her twenties who got a phone when she was 19 and barely uses it to this day and a 15 year old, son who doesn't have one. Their social lives were always just fine. It's something I feel very strongly about.

Without sounding rude, a year 7 isnt going to be into blanket forts or alot of the things suggested above. Maybe upto Year 3/4 at tops. We are out and about all the time, but im happy for my kids to use tech as everything is about balance. Lots of kids use tech instead of watching tv these days (and all of us 90’s kids loved our tv shows!). They will watch their favourite You Tubers instead of the programmes we put on after school (Grange Hill etc). We were still into screens it was just the tv instead of the tablets they have today.

No I know they're not but my suggestions weren't just for teens.

If you've got your teens into hobbies as primary kids though they'll probably be wanting to practice or do things related to them by year 7

@ShoePalaver but using a phone for train times is perfectly normal. Saying you didn't used to has no relevance. We used to lock people up in a home if they had a disability, doesn't make it right.

@LetsgoLego you misunderstand. I'm not being weak and absolving responsibility. I'm taking all the responsibility that I should raise my daughter right and ensure she is as balanced and well rounded and kind as she can be. If she receives a message from someone odd or watched a video she knows isn't right we have a conversation about it.

This lady is saying what we all know to be the truth. It is difficult though as the cat is out of the bag but if it means current 4 and 5 year olds are safer by the time they are teens I am all for it. Children with sm accounts need to be the outliers not the norm.

I have teens. It is near impossible to monitor their sm behaviour and presence. My dd is 15 and only allowed whats app but she still accesses load of crap on youtube etc. She is the only one in her peer group that doesn't have tiktok, snapchat etc. shes at an indi school with lots of nice professional parents and there is constant gossip of sexting and sharing of videos etc. i can easily see how a vunerable child could fall down a rabbit hole. My dd had tiktok but i took it away when i saw how much trans activism was being shared - she was only 12 then and it was a big wake up call to me as to how invasive sm can be.

There is a lot of money in it though - so many want to ensure the gravy train keeps running.

That’s a backlash for people with their eyes and ears open though. That’s a very small percentage. The rest of the population are busy consuming absolute shite day in day out.

I think parents need to be better educated on what steps they can put into place. DH is very IT savvy so we have the following things in place, which is not a magic solution but does help a little.

• to download any app including free ones a message is sent to his and my phones and we have to authorise it.
• our home internet and phone data are blocked to prevent accessing sites with adult content. Means I can’t access sites like the magazine cosmopolitan and some other random ones that aren’t ‘adult sites’. Doesn’t mean that they don’t come across inappropriate content but it helps reduce it
• we have all passwords and access to the cloud.
• we have find my phone on all our phones. It goes both ways so they can see where we are too. Because it’s always been that way they don’t see it as spying but understand it is just a tool to help keep them safe eg if they were late we could see where they are etc. or find phones when they have been dropped in a field!
• when they got phones in year 6 ready for going to secondary we would read all messages each night and could discuss what language was appropriate to help teach them the nuances of texting etc

of course the above measures don’t mean they are safe and we try and have open discussions with them and are hopefully bringing them up to be kind respectful people.

I have never heard of that re reception.

but insisting on tech is actually largely about accessibility. To even the playing field. Using tech for learning is not the issue here.

What’s interesting is how quickly screens for little ones have become normal. I remember posting on a forum when DS was about 4 about how to distract him on a long train journey and the most popular suggestion was wrapping up small things to do as presents- box of crayons, stickers etc- and unwrapping one every hour. No one suggested screens because they just weren’t a thing for kids, this is not much more than a decade ago.

How do you check train times? Or get a phone number?

They don’t issue paper copies anymore.

Society still produced individuals like Genghis khan, attlia the hun, Alexander the great all these before modern technology, tv, library's etc

when the tech improves or if it's already available Could genetically engineering humans to provide part of the solution to improve humans ?

Exactly - taking tech away from most teenagers because of two extremely disturbed individuals is like banning the internet for adults because the tiny minority use it for horrific things.

She was a deeply disturbed child who in my opinion should never have been free to attend school. How did she poison classmates in her previous school and then be allowed to attend school and make friends with a vulnerable girl like Brianna?

There is something deeply wrong with the system that this girl was not already locked away in a secure place.

Yep, evil is evil and will happen with or without the internet, tv, media, etc. It always has.

For all the blanket ban ,full no posters.

Are you:

1 100% sure your children aren't using any of the runarounds to access things, even something as innocuous as watching tiktok on a friend's phone at their house?

And more importantly

1. Confident that if your child did or saw something that was against the rules, if they're in trouble or simply curious/upset about what they did/saw will they be comfortable enough to actually come to you and ask for help and support?

Do you realise how vulnerable ,isolated and defenceless it can make your kids if they fuck up? I've dealt with this side of things(as well as unfettered access) and trust me kids can and do come to harm and it's not all sunshine and roses either.

Well said. It’s absolutely tragic what happened to Brianna, but she had multiple issues and was struggling in almost all areas of her life, SM didn’t cause her death. Being placed in close proximity to a clearly deranged murderer did.

if it wasn’t Brianna that day, it’d have been another one from the kill list.

her mother is trying to look for some meaning in all this, a legacy in Brianna’s name. That’s 100% understandable.

I agree about age restrictions on apps being tougher but the really horrible thing about social media is that distress, high emotional engagement makes money. More upset, more clicks, more comment. This is all to do with the psychology of engagement and it's absolutely designed to pull in children. They don't have a mature capacity to regulate use or discriminate on content.

I do check my children's phones. Group chats etc can be instructive- there are some very disturbed children out there

I'm 50 so grew up.before mobiles let alone smart phones were even a thing ,yes ,we navigated transport etc without them but its much simpler now.