Fair warning, this will be long.
For background context, we live in the USA.
Our oldest is almost 14. She was 11 and in 6th grade at the time the country was shut down. It was 2 days before Spring break, so they called us at home and told the kids to just take an early Spring break. And then they never came back. She never got to say good-bye to any friends or get their phone numbers. She knew we were moving at the end of the school year. She was very traumatized by the way she was suddenly permanently cut off from everyone.
It was horrible where we lived. They closed all parks and walking trails. Kids weren't allowed in any public places. Grocery stores were limiting shoppers per household. Only essential workers were even allowed to drive the roads. My kids had only a 3rd story 5x5 cement balcony to get "fresh air" (we lived by the highway).
During that time, our oldest had a severe mental break down. She started seeing these "ghosts", hearing voices, and became extremely depressed. Nothing in my life could ever prepare me for the pain and fear that my 11-12yr old might kill herself.
Obviously we got her into counceling. The councelor immediately wanted to put her on antipsychotics, which we weren't comfortable with until we had tried other avenues. We put her intense equine therapy, and she completed 3 sets (I think they were 8 weeks/ set). When she was done, it felt like I had my daughter back. No more voices, imaginary friends, or suicidal thoughts.
But she came out the other side with a bad identity crisis. She no longer knew who or what she was. She fell in with a bad crowd at the start of 8th grade. She went from being a lifelong honor student to failing two classes.
During this time, she had been begging to be allowed to publish her art online. I absolutely would not let her have any social media, because I felt her self esteem was still too fragile. One criticism of her art was likely to kill her lifelong dream of being an animator.
I did allow both discord and youtube, though I wouldn't let her post videos to YouTube because of the same fear. Around Christmas, we discovered that she had been using both to send out very sexually explicit messages to complete strangers.
She is 100% a virgin. She's never dated. She doesn't even like kissing scenes in movies. She gets embarrassed at enuendos. This was obviously just a ploy for attention. We had a talk about how dangerous her actions were - not just for her, but also the people on the other end who didn't know they were talking to a 13yr old - and took away all social interaction apps, which was only going to be temporary, but each time we gave her something back, she backdoored her way to other things.
She flagged her school laptop and I was called for a conference with the school councelor because she wrote "I'm done with life". I understood this to just be an expression of frustration, and we talked about being mindful with our words, but it gave me greater pause for allowing social media.
So now I'm in this huge internal conflict. She's about to start high school. She'll be 18 in just 4 years. I don't want to release her to the world naïve. I also don't want her teased for not having social media. But she's ALWAYS been a bully target. There has not been a single year that I haven't had to contact her school about bully concerns. Even when she played sports, she was always the outcast. She's just too introverted and unique. We had to contact the superintendent over a boy on her bus just this past year. The plus side is that she has always been comfortable coming to me and telling me about the problems she has.
So do I protect her while I can? Because I'm afraid of online bullies. She also is recovering from a mental breakdown, depression, anxiety, and an identity crisis. She says she just wants an outlet for her art but I havent been able to find any art platform that doesn't allow explicit content. I keep telling her that she should just make art for herself, not other people, but she gets frustrated and says I don't understand.
If I allow something, what? Discord was where the problems started, because friends were adding friends and there were all these people she didn't know on there. She literally used YouTube to backdoor her way to explicit messages. But I can't just not trust her forever. Still, she's taken advantage of our trust in the past.
I don't have Facebook anymore and I do worry about their privacy breaches and targeted ads. I don't want social media raising her or telling her what to think. Neither my husband nor I has ever had tiktok or instagram or snapchat. I've read articles about girls who spend time on instagram having lower self esteem, which is not something she can afford, and obviously the appeal of snapchat is that photos disappear. I do worry about her sexual chats escalating over snapchat.
Originally I was planning on letting her have Tumblr as a Facebook alternative when she entered high school. My reasoning was that it was more art-minded and less kids her age to bully her. But then I worry that maybe she should have a better sense of self before trying a mega platform like that, especially one in the art world, where identity is so fluid.
Right now I have her restricted to which apps she can use, but I feel like I need to start letting go. I'm just not sure how to do that while also making sure she's safe and emotionally ready.