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

There's also the issue of Maths here.

If we assume this is directed at mothers of teenagers in 2026, that means they had the child around 2012. The average age to have a first child in 2012 was 28.

That means that they were aged 6 in 1990. So you're specifically asking for images of children drinking, getting into gigs and festivals and apparently, stripping off for men to take photos of them on the beach to be all free and happy (and not in any way appealing to the Hebephillic tendencies in the population) when they were, on average UNDER THE AGE OF CONSENT.

I know that perimenopause can do one on some women, but fucking hell, Mumsnet, it's never affected my ability to count.

Thanks all - genuinely appreciate the feedback.

The aim of the campaign is to provoke a conversation about whether young people are spending too much of their lives online, and whether they’re missing out on some of the messier, freer, more real-world experiences previous generations had offline.

To be clear, the campaign was never meant literally as “all mums of teenagers today were off raving naked in 1990”. It’s drawing on the broader social media trend around 80s/90s youth culture and the nostalgia many people feel for a more offline adolescence - hanging around with friends, getting bored, going out, making mistakes, having adventures, doing things that weren’t constantly mediated through phones.

But it’s also very clear from this thread that the “nudes/nude” skinny dipping pic is landing in a way many people are uncomfortable with. That obviously wasn’t the intention, so we won’t pursue that route further.

The wider campaign absolutely isn’t anti-technology or suggesting teenagers should live exactly as previous generations did. Phones are obviously useful and unavoidable now. The point is more that it's clear from our research that many parents feel something valuable has been lost if huge chunks of adolescence are spent through screens rather than in the real world.

One of the useful things about Mumsnet is that you get very honest reactions very quickly - so thank you for that. We’ll take the feedback on board as the campaign develops.

They're not missing out on those because of phones. They're missing out because of lack of money, lack of third spaces, IDing being stricter, age limits on festivals and gigs, living in car-centric places where you're very dependent on lifts to do anything, less time spent on their own or going to places on their own (whether latchkey kids or socialising) because of safety concerns, and youth culture movements largely being experienced through the internet because of all of these.

Hmm, I also think you should lose the naked picture. I did skinny-dip with friends as a teen- totally non-sexual- and it was great, but I think even the most innocent things when photographed and sent out into the world can be misused and misunderstood. And the great thing about it was feeling free and having fun, not "getting nude". Maybe just switch for a picture of some teens enjoying an outdoor swim with clothes on. "Lakes, not Likes", "Diving in, not logging on" etc etc.

I also think you need to pitch it carefully so that it doesn't come across as telling teens that the things they like are rubbish. Terms like "actual hobbies" imply that online hobbies aren't actual hobbies, when of course they are. Better to be positive about life off-screen without rubbishing some of the positive things people do on-screen.

Having said all that, I actually really like the idea behind all this. My kids are older teens and often talk about wishing they had been born before phones and how great it must have been not to be constantly checking socials or being photographed, and tapping into the idea that they can actually live like that now if they choose (as we all can if we choose) seems great. Just needs a few tweaks.

A campaign for safe and affordable activities for teens would be great.

Let's say teens did put their phones down and go outside - where would they go? What would they do? Adults seem to hate it when teens hang around together in groups.

There's not a lot out there for teenagers and what there is costs a bomb.

Hobbies? What hobbies? Where? Organised by who? Costing how much?

Provision for teens is woefully inadequate.

Before suggesting they get out there and do stuff it would be good to have stuff out there for them to do.

Honestly, as a small-town teenager whose interests were seen as weird and was unpopular at school, having access to the internet to connect with people who thought more like myself would have meant I had a much better time growing up!

Hanging around outside McDonald's, or being 15 and staring into space whilst my friend did god knows what with a boy in the pub toilets didn't really do much for me. And even then people got arsey about teenagers hanging round in groups, getting together to play football in the street etc.

I'll have to dig out my old photo albums but I'll see what I can find.

This is a terrible campaign.

whoever came up with this idea needs
sacking.

Also - do you get consent from everyone photographed, not just the person who sends it in?

I grew up in an even smaller town (no McDonald's to hang around) and remember conversations in the school corridors about what people were going to to that evening evening/weekend. The most common plan was 'walk around town'.

This. If MN were to front a campaign that actually provided spaces for teens that would be amazing.

As a teen in the 90s, from about 15 we all went to the pub and had a couple of beers. No-one cared and we got to hang out with friends. Most pubs served us and sometimes even if they didn’t they didn’t care if we hung out there. I also went to gigs from 14 and clubbing from 16. My teens can’t do any of this. So how do you want them to replicate our 90s lives. Stand on a street corner? Hang around park?

DP's was 'Meet the mates, including the one with an older brother who could buy the vodka, cider and cigarettes and go and get drunk outside the village, trying not to cross paths with the local gay/longhaired/goth/visibly disabled/just smaller than them and their Dads weren't farmers so didn't own a shotgun bashing kids of the same age on their way home from the Youth Club as ending up in hospital from getting a kicking outside the bus station at 9.42pm just before the last bus home leaves from the nearest market town 10 miles away tends to put a dampener on the weekend'.

The 1990s. Awesome. Get out there, kids. It's fun when you're 14.

Have you done any research involving the actual demographic you’re trying to reach here, ie teens, and what sort of campaign would appeal to them? Because it doesn't seem like they're the target audience for a campaign based around nostalgia for a decade they weren't even born in. Or was it a misspeak in your original post, and the actual target audience is the mums themselves? Because that's honestly the only way I can make sense of your marketing.

A lot of the nostalgia teens have for the 90s/Y2K era (and it is a very big thing) is aesthetics, but a good part of it are the things you can no longer do as someone the same age now, for all sorts of reasons that aren't limited to the existence of the smartphone. The death of the club scene, and the ability to participate in it as early as your mid-teens if you were good at makeup, is probably the biggest one.

Although I guess at least underage vaping isn't as hard to hide as underage smoking.

When I saw the picture of the three teenage girls/young women on the pebbly beach at night it made me think of today's news. Three women were found dead in the sea off Brighton beach early this morning (Wednesday 13 May 2026).

Where are you planning on running this campaign so your target audience see it?

Also interested to hear about this

This, a hundred times over. This!!!

So both these posts from Justine are Chatgpt generated.

And the OP has nude teen girls in it.

This is a very odd thread.

And the nude teens are still there and that photo hasn’t been removed.

Mumsnet has enough trouble with creepy perverts and this makes it look like they are actively recruiting them. So misjudged.

Justine didn't say the photo was being removed, just that it won't be used for the campaign.

Or at least that's how I read it.

whether she did or didn’t say that, it needs to be removed. Is there clear consent in place for it to be shared?

Yikes.

Glad to see MN have had their arse handed to them for this. This is so weird. Snogging behind the bike sheds? Tiny tops?

Is Mumsnet about to launch some kind of wine range or something, and everyone at MNHQ has been taste testing it???

This reads like pure ai