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MNHQ

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

2 replies

JustineMumsnet · 12/05/2026 15:05

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

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MNHQ

JustineMumsnet · 12/05/2026 20:15

Fair challenge - and to be clear, the intention absolutely isn’t to encourage kids to share nude photos.

The image makes more sense alongside the strapline it was designed for: “Your mum didn’t send nudes. She was nude.” The broader point of the campaign is that previous generations experienced freedom, rebellion, friendships, boredom, messiness and real life offline, rather than through phones and social media.
But point taken that, separated from the line and context, the image can land differently.

The overall aim of the campaign is very much the opposite: to encourage kids to spend less of their lives online and more of it actually living. And it's meant to be a little bit provocative.

MNHQ

JustineMumsnet · 13/05/2026 16:17

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.

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