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

So you already do, and will do, pretty much what those parents you blame for this did? As ime it kind of starts with the console when they can use it as a way to socialise with pals online.

You kids will ask for a console from when they are about 5 BTW. And phones will enter their orbit at around 8 if not sooner. Good luck.

(my kids never got a tablet on long journeys, they read a book, and they got consoles when I decided they were ready)

Not all apps are bad either my son wss diagnosed with Diabetes last year ( he was seriously ill.on diagnosis) he now has a Dexcom,fitted to continually monitor his blood sugars and an app.on his phone alerts him if his blood sugars go-to low or high.

Well it was easy in the past because no one else had phones either. Isn’t that obvious?

I wish none of them had phones either and believe me we held out longer than most but in our society for your average sociable teen having no smart phone is unthinkable.

unrealistic in this day and age sadly

a Tory mp said similar the other day - Miriam cates I think- and was widely derided (she is unhinged though, unless Mrs Ghey who has been extremely dignified throughout )

I do hope something happens in the wake of this tragic murder. Perhaps schools getting more involved.

A bit of off topic but it’s unbelievable that Scarlett assaulted another child and the new school that she was moved to (Brianna’s) wasn’t told. Surely that shouldn’t happen.

This is a very good point. Although some parents seem to start ridiculously young with the unrestricted internet access I’m dreading the teen years. I don’t see the problem with messaging apps that are monitored for teens but all the other shite TikTok, Snapchat etc just seems a recipe for disaster. For a start it’s designed to be addictive and that on an undeveloped brain is worrying.

I completely agree that it could and should be done. But you lot are the parents- collectively, you have the power. But as this thread demonstrates, you don’t have the will to see it through. Nobody else is going to do it for you. Your kids won’t police themselves, the tech companies sure as hell won’t do it, and if the schools tried half of you would be storming them with pitchforks. It’s on you, and you aren’t trying hard enough. It’s not that wildly different from Americans failing to do anything about gun laws.

*Teenagers always cry because they're "being left out".

"But everyone else does X / has those shoes / that bag / goes to Y".

The answer I got was "well good for them, but you're not".*

It's not the same though as all that happened to you was you didn't have the shoes you wanted. Nowadays, if a teenager doesn't have a phone they are left out of conversations, jokes, fun, gossip and meeting up plans.

When my dd was about thirteen (now nineteen) she was in quite a large friendship group and one of the girls was a Jehovah Witness and she had no phone, she was definitely out of the loop despite the best efforts of the other girls.

It was a million times worse in lockdown but even in normal times she was just not in text conversations that were happening. I remember getting home from high school and waiting until 6pm for the free phone calls to start and phoning school friends who I had just seen two hours earlier.

Of course they don’t.

A lot of the private schools in SF have a complete tech ban - although that’s more because the people that designed them know they are addictive and mess with focus, than from worry about content.

However this is dependant on active parenting.

I don’t see why people act like ‘oh, they could see horrific content at their friend’s house anyway, so there’s no point trying’ is such a gotcha, as if that’s at all comparable to having 24/7 unrestricted access to the internet. Many of the problems smartphones cause such as poor impulse control, degraded concentration span, obsession, going ‘down a rabbit hole’ etc. aren’t even relevant to occasional use.

By sheer coincidence, this is my Sunday morning reading courtesy of the Spectator.

Right so when they ask you’ll give stuff to them and this is the fault of previous generations of parents and not you?

They can join in "gossip, jokes, meeting up plans" etc with a regular brick phone.

No need for a smartphone.

@Wexler1216 100% this! A small minority may figure out a way around not having a smart phone, but it may stop the vast majority from sitting alone in their bedrooms browsing adult content. Win? Nothing works 100%.

Possibly tin foil hat territory but I don't think there will be any political will for this. Mass media in all its forms is too useful for creating division and to spread the ideology of the moment. Individual attempts to limit children's access to social media would never become uniform and as others have said the tech savvy youth who outstrip alot of us by a country mile would find a way to circumvent said restriction.

I also agree that the more a thing us restricted the more attractive it becomes - see Prohibition.

We are unfortunately dependent on technology and it is escalating at every turn.

This particular tragedy is appalling.

I think the most important thing is to try and cultivate open and honest relationships with our children and be prepared to discuss everything that crops up in as level headed a manner as possible.

I've had discussions with younger males about Andrew Tate. It's difficult when you're internally seething but the merest twitch of disapproval sends them defensive. So softly softly it has to be.

It's a bit of a war between various factions to "catch 'em young" i feel.

Perhaps the answer is for our generation to stage a takeover of all social media platforms and drown it out to the point where kids wouldn't want to go near it.

But I suspect it is sadly a losing battle at this point.

I think software parent had that alerted them if inappropriate things were being watched would be great. We have similar software in school . It flags to an adult, and then you can go chat about it with the pupil.

I also dont believe companies cant do more to stop anyone watching torture on the dark web - not just children.

Its almost impossible to monitor tik tok and snapchat from what i can see. You need to leave it until as late as possible before your children go anywhere near them. But it is hard to stop a 14 year old. Especially when school uses apps for homework.

If they put ages restrictions on, this generation are very savvy on tech, they'd get a VPN installed.
They'd find a way.

This is the worst reason for doing nothing. Some kids might find a way round it but many wouldn’t, and it would be a big step away from the normalisation of phones for kids/young teens.

They can't join in messenger groups though can they ?
My son and his friends are on discord and chat through that
I have a,Facebook messenger group that I chat to my friends through
And my DH chat ,s to.his mates on What,sApp.

And if you find out as a parent tht something is happening when they visit a friends house that you dont agree with/allow/approve of then just like any other thing thats going on, you either speak to that parent or you say they cant visit.

There are apps, I had Google link on both of mine which meant they couldn't download anything without my permission.

I've always conducted spot checks on their phones, not at night when they're asleep. But walk up to them randomly whilst they're using it and they hand it over, so they can't delete anything at the end of the day.

With my eldest, who Google link doesn't work for now, it's more frequent checking, having all her log ins and lots and lots of conversations.

Not fool proof by any measure, but it's something.

Wholeheartedly agree with this and DD will only be getting a old style Nokia phone. There's too many issues with photo/video phones

I work within the Criminal Justice system. As a result my DC do not have social media of any form. They are 16DD and 13DS They didn't like it initially but my 16DD admitted last week she's glad I never let her ad she sees so much drama at college.

They do use age appropriate YouTube though, don't like it but we compromised on it.

this puzzles me. Why is it not possible? Admittedly mine are in Y6 and Y8 so I don’t know about older teens but we’ve just said no. They still have friends, go out etc. they have phones with ordinary messages allowed but with cameras and photos disabled. No apps. No browser. Some other parents I know do the same. The more that do say no, the easier it will be for everyone. What am I missing?

It's no catch-all. Even music. Some rap/drill stuff they listen to nowadays is not something kids should be listening to. Cardi B and the like is bad enough.

Yeah, I agree with that. I can say with a fair amount of confidence that my 13 year old would have no desire to seek out videos of live torture and murder. Just like I have had unfettered access for years and also have no desire.

I suppose the point though, Is that if you are that way inclined, the material is there to view and then it normalises it?

Apparently it was common knowledge she had a kill list, how was that not red flagged???!!!

You are conflating different types of technology here. Consoles are gaming devices and there is no evidence whatsoever that gaming is damaging for children. What evidence there is suggests that gaming, especially group gaming, is a net positive for preteen/teen boys in particular. It's not as good as in person play and team sports but it helps with some of the social development that they do.

Social media is a different thing entirely and it's social media that appears to be responsible for much of the downturn in young people's mental health and social ability. Especially in teen girls. Conflating two very different things just because they both come on similar technology will ultimately make it harder to parent and be trusted by your kids to understand what's going on when they get older.