To allow DD (15) unlimited doomscrolling time?

[ConcernedMum84]

I completely back Smartphone Free Childhood (www.smartphonefreechildhood.org), but sadly DD and her friends got their smartphones in Year 7 before I’d heard about them.

A friend with an older daughter allowed her unlimited access to social media throughout secondary school and by Sixth Form she was so bored of doomscrolling that she rarely looked at social media.

Has anyone else had the same experience with their teenagers?

It breaks my heart to watch DD spend well over an hour a day watching her friends and other random teenage girls putting on their makeup and doing the latest social media trend dances. It’s a complete waste of her young life and there’s increasing evidence that scrolling on social media creates a genuine addiction, damages attention spans and causes ADHD-like symptoms.

We’ve discussed this and she understands my view, but says she finds it very relaxing, it helps her wind down after school and interracting with her friends’ posts boosts their confidence and makes them feel she is a genuine friend who really cares about them.

AIBU to allow her to doomscroll for hours as long as she keeps up with her hobbies and schoolwork, hoping that she’ll eventually get bored and will then be free from her addiction to social media and in control of how she spends her time when she reaches Sixth Form?

I think at 15 you do need to move away from rules and limitations and towards them self-regulating. I'd keep a dialogue open, but if she's living an otherwise full life then letting her self-regulate her doom scrolling may be worth a try.

Ensure you have read The Anxious Generation by J Haig
talk to her about the stats
then discuss with her the way forward
rather than set rules she will want and find a way to break have a collaborative plan about how to protect her from the addictive harmful aspects of social media and reels and then support her to implement this

Yes sorry YABU.

For every kid who ends up getting bored of it, I think there will be many more who end up with horrific mental health issues/ anxiety/ terrible habits that last a lifetime.

At 15 it’s still a good idea to at least try to impose healthy boundaries (by which I mean a decent amount in the day but no phones overnight etc) so there is a happy medium here.

It’s bad for adults to doomscroll for hours on end, let alone children. She needs limits.

Hey @ConcernedMum84 I know loads of parents battling the same problem! Ans I have the same kind of concerns with my dd15 (y10).

Our problem was Covid lockdown - dd found herself on Roblox a lot, chatting to friends on voice calls whilst their avatars played together in the online space. It seriously saved her MH in lockdown - but it left her with an online habit that was very regrettable.

Many of DD’s friends fell into insta and TikTok habits very young, at primary school.DD calls them the “makeup girls” - they love their selfies and are addicted to watching randoms and big influencers alike online . I kept dd off these SM platforms until age13 and she wasn’t pushing for them; BUT she his absolutely addicted to YT and Netflix/Prime. This is how she relaxes - where I was listening to Blur albums, she is listening to reruns of Greys Anatomy or watching Mr Beast’s latest shenanigans or whatever.

I’m so conflicted because she is online for hours per day but she is still ticking all the boxes: My dd still volunteers two hours a week, is smashing out 8s and 9s at school, does four hours of sport a week and is doing silver DofE. Last week she binge-read two novels in two days. She rarely sees friends at weekends or in vacations but she has 16 friends who she spends considerable amounts of time with, chatting online or hanging out after school.

I do think so much screen time is bad for her, and I worry. But then I remember being addicted to certain computer games - is this really worse?

I encourage dd to find more challenging content - for every 15 mins of crap, watch something edifying. She has accordingly become a big fan of astro-physics and spends a lot of time learning about that online.

It is so hard to know how to parent this. I do not think I’m in control.

"Well over an hour a day" doesn't sound too bad! If that's genuinely the amount of time she's spending, I'd say she's self-regulating pretty well already.

15 year old teenagers today have been brought up watching adults permanently glued to their phone. Morning fix, scroll before coffee.
The adults should be leading by example.
It is not different than growing up with any addict parent, smoker, drinker, drugs, if your DC constantly see you with it in her hand, they’ll follow the lead.

Over an hour doesn't seem that much compared to other teenagers, to be honest! You can try to get a 15 year old to stop doing it, but whether you will succeed is another matter.
My adult son was addicted to his phone and other devices when he was a teen, probably worse around 14-16. He's less obsessed with it than me now, he seems to rarely use social media and has deleted most of it.

Everything in moderation, we’re raising a generation of teenagers, some who don’t know how to communicate with a stranger.
As long as there is a balance.
i don’t mind my teenage daughter playing Roblox, she’s aware of stranger danger, it stimulates her imagination and I hear her belly laugh with school friends on voice-chat.
We all watched tv and read the cereal box in the morning, 89’s iPad.

Lots of interesting thoughts here! Thank you.

Does scrolling on Mumsnet count?