Need your help with pre smartphone youth photos for new Rage Against the Screens campaign

[JustineMumsnet]

Hi all,
We’re looking for real photos from Mumsnetters’ gloriously pre-smartphone youths for a new Mumsnet ad campaign about getting kids off screens and back into real life (part of our wider Rage Against the Screen campaign).

We’re calling it Your Mum Thinks You Should Live a Little and the basic message to teens is:

1. Your mum was actually quite cool once
2. There’s more to life than staring at a screen and your mum wants you to go out and live it

It’s a celebration of the slightly chaotic, occasionally misspent, entirely offline lives we were living before social media arrived.
Think:

• blurry disposable-camera nights out
• giant trousers and tiny tops
• first festivals
• dodgy fringes
• snogging behind the bike sheds
• actual hobbies
• friendship groups that existed in 3D
• rave/goth/indie/skater/grunge pics
• terrible fashion choices
• chaotic holidays
• badly decorated teenage bedrooms
• anything that screams “1990s”

If you’d like to contribute, upload your photos here.
If we’d keen to use any as part of the campaign, we’ll of course contact you directly first.

We’ve shared a few examples below to get everyone started. Let us know what you think?
Thanks,
Justine

It’s also rather normalising the teenage sending of nudes. It does happen but the vast majority of teens don’t do it and it’s illegal in many cases. To so casually reference it as if it’s a normal everyday occurrence is awful.

I'm sure whoever thought of this found it hilarious and/or provocative.

It's not. It is creepy AF and nonsensical.

Even the idea of normalising sending nudes to teens is just...mind blowingly stupid tbh.

Sorry if we have burst someone's marketing world bubble.

X-post about the sending nudes. So much wrong with this whole thing.

Oh come on where are the non prudes on mumsnet? There’s got to be more than just me.

great campaign justine, keep going

Yeah, it normalises sending nudes, and do we actually want to be encouraging teens to "get nude" instead, I know it's probably intended in an innocent skinny-dipping kind of way but could easily read as sexual.

You think that not encouraging teens to get nude and normalising them sending nudes is prudish? I mean teens will be teens, they’ll do what they do, as we all did. But I’m not sure their mums and big companies need to be pushing it….

I don’t think it’s really possible to get teenagers off their phones unless more parents start to lead by example.

It’s like sparking up a cigarette and lecturing them about not smoking.

"Mom didn't take nudes, she was nude and she let other people photograph her. Live your life, kids, go get naked and let people photograph it!"

The image makes more sense alongside the strapline it was designed for: “Your mum didn’t send nudes. She was nude.

Does it heck. I was in my 40s before I had a smartphone and I certainly wasn't bloody stripping off, instead of scrolling.

That’s another good point. I grew up in the 90s and was a pretty rebellious teen. I never got naked with my friends unless it was sexual. Is this a thing?

The strap line makes it even worse 🙈 I appreciate the sentiment but this campaign completely misses the mark. A good campaign doesn’t need an explanation. It just works. This doesn’t.

Yes all of this. This is very very misconceived. If I said any of this to my teenagers they’d leave the room and at pace if I started talking about me being nude. The rest is just patronising bollocks which they would dismiss as yep that’s great mum but it’s not the 90s and we’re not previous generations.

No teenager in the history of teenagers has ever said “oh mum I get it now, you were so much cooler, I want to be just like you”.

Yes also this - I wasn’t taking my clothes off on a regular basis as a teenager and don’t remember anyone else doing that either. So the message wouldn’t really land because if they asked me if I spent my teenage years nude I’d have to say no, obviously, it was mostly cold and damp.

I love this idea.

If I may add some points (ignoring the nude situation).

I am imagining this in real life. On tubes adverts, transport, buses etc. It has to also be offline to fit the meaning of the campaign. Even if that limits the reach to cities and towns that can change culture and spread elsewhere.

As a 90s kid the big one that gets me is concerts. You stand in stagnant crowd amidst a sea of phone lights and it’s the most stark and depressing thing. These poor youth. That side by side going down a tube escalator contrasted with 90s raves would be super cool.

Also I think to make this campaign effective it might be worth considering not branding it. That’s a big thing to do. You’re paying for something you won’t get credit or advertising for. But it’s going to be 100x more effective.

Lastly please tackle iPads in schools. I have a son starting reception next year and I do not want him glued to an iPad randomly clicking buttons until it’s goes win woopie. Ridiculous idea. Besides the mental effects these kids are going to have repetitive strain injury and shit eyesight by the time they leave school.

Also this rage against the screens campaign- what’s the aim? Smartphones and screens exist, they are useful, we all use them. How do we reconcile our own use as adults whilst simultaneously telling young people they are terrible? Like most people I use mine all the time, work, friends, family, mumsnet, shopping, social media. How do I role model that without being a massive hypocrite? And yes schools have banned them (for years now) but teenagers still actually need them to check their homework, their timetable, take photos of a white board arrange to see their friends etc so the school bans are really just performative.

Of course parents can control screen use for little ones but once they get to secondary school age screens are increasingly a part of their life and their social network. Trying to persuade teenagers to not use them via a photo of their mum with a dodgy fringe is bonkers. We need to work out how to use them without exposing young people (or anyone) to harm (which I think is mostly one for the tech companies and governments to sort out) but a campaign run on the basis that teenagers will be persuaded to give them up because their parents apparently had more fun back in the day isn’t going to work.

Yeah, no! Its not right to post photos of naked teenagers. And to be honest, I dont come here for the naked bodies!

You really need to lose the nude teen girls.

Same. Any nudity was usually the result of coercion from a male too. There was a lot of pressure back then and very little awareness and understanding of sexual abuse. What sprung to mind when I saw the nude pic of young females was that they would have been persuaded to do that by a man.

Now if you showed a pic of teenaged males mooning, I'd say that was a more typical, spontaneous, rebellious teenage thing. Still not sure I'd want to see it again though, it was bad enough the first time round.

Justine, can you explain the "your mum was nude" strapline? Do you believe that's normal behaviour? Do you think girls aren't sufficiently encouraged to be nude in today's world? Is the idea actually reverse psychology to try to keep girls safer?

Or have you not really thought about it and just went with the flow of the person whose idea it was?

The nude thing is just ridiculous, inappropriate and dangerous.

I’m really concerned ed about this. How did the photo get through the filter? How can Mumsnet do any sort of a campaign about social media awareness and not sending nodes when they are procuring and distributing nude pictures of girls and distributing them.

This makes me feel sick and violated.

I was never nude with my friends, except possibly briefly when in changing rooms. This campaign will be completely alien to many of us from more 'conservative' cultures. For want of a better word.

The rest of the campaign isn't much better really.

Wtf mumsnet?

You need to loose the photos of naked children/teen girls.

NOT COOL AT ALL

Yes. I don't think @JustineMumsnet adding that strap line makes things any better!

You say prude, I say someone is trying to encourage normalisation of teens sending nudes. Why would that be?