Emilie Silverwood-Cope: Social media is tampering with young people’s self-esteem
While the Online Safety Bill is debated and rewritten, Kate Winslet starred in, and co-authored I am Ruth. It is a devasting family drama which laid bare the agony that can come with parenting a teen in the digital age.
Winslet starred alongside her real life daughter, Mia Threapleton, who plays Freya, aged 17. Seventeen is a well chosen age. It is the age a teen is moving from childhood to adulthood, and life can feel particularly overwhelming as academic pressures build. Kate plays a middle-aged mum, struggling to get the right tone and find the perfect words to help her unhappy daughter.
We have all been that parent. We have all found ourselves grappling for the right thing to say in a key moment and, instead of fixing a problem, our desperation just makes it worse. It was agony hearing my own fall back phrases of “get out for a walk”, “have something to eat”, “tell me what’s wrong” and how futile they sounded when directed at a depressed teenager. Ruth wants her child to get back on track, to cheer up, to re-engage with life and school, but mainly, she just wants her to be happy.
But Freya is desperately unhappy and her story will resonate with many families across the country.
Last month saw the publication of the Mental Health of Children and Young People in England 2022 report (published by NHS Digital). It showed that the mental health crisis is worsening. There has been an increase in the proportion of 17 to 19-year-olds with a probable mental disorder: it is now one in four (up from one in six). The report also shows that among 17 to 24-year-olds, the prevalence was much higher in young women (31.2 per cent) than in young men (13.3 per cent). In short, it’s a difficult time to be a 17-year-old girl.
Ruth can see her daughter is unhappy but she doesn’t know why. She can’t see what we see, which is a girl alternately crying in her bed or spending hours taking revealing photos of herself to share on social media.
This generation of teens have lived through the loneliness of lockdown and now exist in the cult of perfection as typified by Love Island. The need to find acceptance, approval and love is especially acute at this age. That need is gamified when it happens on Instagram. Self-worth and self-esteem is wrapped up in comments, likes and follows.
Without any real guidance parents have been left alone to manage the tech and mental health issues. I know of more and more parents coming to the same conclusions as Ruth: that it is her phone usage is making her daughter ill.
I don’t need to see this played out in a Channel 4 drama - I hear it over and over again from other parents. I know of boys targeted online by drug dealers and children bullied via TikTok. Only last week I got an email from my daughter’s school warning about risky online behaviour and local children being at risk of grooming on Snapchat. It’s starting to feel like the landmines are impossible to avoid, regardless of parental controls and rules.
Parents are accountable for our children’s safety online while too many are not even aware how or why it’s unsafe. It is like we have been sold a household appliance which doesn’t have to comply with any safety regulations and no one is obliged to tell us how it’s unsafe. Parents, and our MPs, accept the suggested age of 13 (the age tech giants allow a child to create an account) in spite of it being an age that has nothing whatsoever to do with teen safety. Thirteen is the age US law deems it acceptable for tech to collect data and target our children with advertising. It is solely about profit and is baked into their business model. It is not to do with the suitability of Instagram for a teen girl. It is not about the safety of girls like Freya who wind up self-harming and on an ever growing NHS waiting list.
These mental health reports are starting to feel a bit like the climate change reports. We hear the awful news and we all know what is probably causing the crisis, but few will come out and say it clearly. Kate Winslet did say it, not just via I am Ruth but on BBC’s Woman’s Hour and she spoke for many of us: “I don’t want to be accused of being a celebrity on a soap box. But it is possible to say no [to social media]. It’s tampering with young people’s self-esteem. It is clearly making them depressed.”
Read more Parenting Truths from Emilie Silverwood-Cope every month in the Cambridge Independent.
