Emilie Silverwood-Cope: Are adults leading children by example on social media?
There’s been a lot of discussion this month about how children behave online, what they watch and how appalling the consequences can be in real life.
The debate continues about what are the workable safety measures and who is responsible for implementing them. All those unlikeable tech CEOs keep telling us that they do really, genuinely care about our children so please don’t delete those accounts. Safety is on their to-do list. We also have politicians wading in demanding better controls or promising better controls.
Meanwhile, schools run Safer Internet initiatives about what children should do to keep themselves safe from the types of harm they can’t even imagine. They are told they should take care of their digital footprint, ignore types like Andrew Tate, resist dangerous TikTok challenges, keep themselves safe from bullying, avoid becoming a bully or even part of a screaming online mob.
My question is, are we leading by example? When I look at how adults behave on social media I can’t help notice that we are expecting our children to have standards that too many of us struggle to live up to ourselves. The Egg Prank viral trend that kicked off in 2023 is a good example of just this. These videos have been viewed upwards of 900 million times on TikTok alone.
Here’s how they go: mum is filming with her young child in the kitchen. The child is typically about four years old and the two of them are getting ready to bake together. So far, so wholesome. Mum holds an egg, getting ready to crack it into the bowl of flour. Instead, she hits it on her child’s forehead. The child’s face goes from happy to shocked to crying while mum doubles up with laughter. The video is uploaded onto TikTok using the hashtag #eggprank and it joins the other thousands of similar videos of other parents doing the same.
There have been so many of them made that you can now watch compilations of the most viewed - which include children saying “That wasn’t very nice”, “That hurt”, or even hitting the parent back. For likes and views, parents are more than willing to take part in a TikTok challenge that humiliates and hurts their child. Dan Wuori, child expert said: “[The challenge] provides children with data points that suggest their parents can be unexpectedly cruel. Some will argue that these are just jokes for good fun. They are not. They are deliberate infliction of trauma for the amusement of strangers. It should go without saying that this isn’t good for children.”
Adults are evidently more than capable of behaving horribly online. They have arguments with strangers on social media, insulting comments fly back and forth under the most benign Instagram posts. They fall for and share conspiracy theories and are vulnerable to grooming and romance scams. I’ve seen more times than I can remember people use social media to get other people fired from their jobs. Meanwhile, we tell children not to take part in dangerous and harmful TikTok challenges and to get off their screens. The kids must think we are all raging hypocrites as they sit through yet another assembly on being kind online.
Seventy-five per cent of parents have shared their children’s data online. The baby’s digital footprint begins at first scan when that grainy image is shared to Instagram. I’m willing to bet that today’s child has had more photos taken of them on one family holiday than the average 1970s child had taken during their entire childhoods. How do we have the nerve to tell children to mind what they post and how they behave?
The discussions this month once again centred on what Meta, Discord, Snapchat and TikTok should do to make children safer on their platforms. I am beginning to wonder if we need to just stop pretending. If us adults can’t resist the lure to be our worst selves, what hope does a 13-year-old have? Zuckerberg is never going to care more about your child than you do.
Don’t leave them alone online for hours. Don’t let them post in WhatsApp groups without checking what they are talking about. Don’t assume parenting stops at the virtual online world.
Read more Parenting Truths from Emilie Silverwood-Cope every month in the Cambridge Independent.
