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SUPERNANNY, JO FROST, has been in the news this week for comments recently made about young kids filming their school routines, and posting (or the parents are posting) these videos to social media.
Recent years have seen an increase in parents overdoing it on sharing their and their children’s lives online, otherwise known as ‘sharenting’.
I want to preface this by saying that I love Supernanny, and I adore her TV shows. Each episode left me with just enough hope that I was on the verge of resolving whatever stage was currently ruining my life, and a little glimmer of superiority, that maybe we weren’t that bad after all. They just don’t make TV like that any more.
Anyway, this week, Jo is giving out about super produced mornings, and honestly, she has a very valid argument. In her Instagram post, Jo said ‘Let children wake with bed head, not produced parents’, and she is referring to parents filming the morning, from the time kids wake up. If you have ever tried to get a child ready for school, then you likely also cannot imagine setting up a ring light and trying to film it.
I follow a lot of parenting bloggers and so have seen countless videos of other families’ mornings and never really given it much thought. But if you think about the behaviour, where parents are setting up the scene from the moment they wake their kids, and then filming the full morning to post online, isn’t it a bit strange? The first few days of school are a rollercoaster for kids, and would any of us appreciate a camera in the face from the second we wake up?
When I go further into it, and think about the amount of videos I have mindlessly watched, about sibling fights, or meltdowns, or even kids who are upset about something and trying to talk to their parents, should I even be able to watch this?
I can recall multiple videos where you can see the moment that the kid notices the camera and realises that they aren’t just having a private moment with their parent (who they have gone to for comfort). That this moment is going to be for public consumption, and you then see their entire body language change.
As someone who went to an Irish secondary school, I cannot tell you how much I would not have wanted my morning filmed and posted online where anyone could access it.
In her post this week, Supernanny also referenced 7,8- and 9-year-olds who are doing ‘Get Ready with Me’ videos, and that is really scary. We are also now seeing really young, 13- and 14-year-old ‘influencers’ making a name for themselves online. And while I do think that social media gets a bad rep whenever we talk about kids using it, even I baulk at the thoughts of child influencers. Honestly, I thought it was more of an ‘over the pond thing’ that wouldn’t really take off here.
These are really tough years for kids, and turning their lives into a production where they can clearly see how the larger population has received each video through likes, shares and comments, really just feels like a dangerous world to expose them to. How many of us have ruined a night out or a holiday away by focusing too much on the photos, the setup, or the outfits, or trying to get a single family photo where everyone is smiling?
As adults, most of us can probably identify when we are losing ourselves too much to social media, and that the photo for Instagram isn’t even worth a fraction of the happiness of the people in the photo, but can our kids do that? And can our kids do that if we have already turned their childhood into a performance piece?
It’s like the old saying ‘Find a job you love, and you will never have to work another day in your life… because you’ll work 24/7 without a break and until you despise the very thing you liked in the first place’. I might be paraphrasing, but it’s true. If you have ever turned a hobby into a performative piece for the general public, you will know how quickly it was ruined.
When my two were little I was at home with them for a few years, and at one point tried to turn my hand to baking cupcakes and cakes, and building an online platform for it. And my God, when I tell you, trying to turn a hobby into a living wage was a huge mistake, and I cannot stress that enough. Because I took something that was a creative and relaxing outlet for me, and I made it public and performative. And then I had to change the way I wanted to do it in order for it to be better received by absolute strangers online, and long story short; my mixer has been in storage for the past six years. So if the pressure to perform can ruin hobbies, how will it translate for kids with no escape from the camera?
I think that a lot of kids would love to be influencers. All they see is the glitter and sparkle of it, and they probably think it’s an easy gig with a lot of benefits. But influencers, and particularly the TikTok ones who are under pressure to post daily, are living their lives from a production point of view, where everything in their daily lives is assessed as ‘content’. And as adults, they can make that choice for their lives, but I do not think that we should be letting children do the same.
Turning childhood or adolescence into a performative piece to be graded by strangers online, is going to be incredibly damaging to a developing brain. A recent New York Times investigation exposed the dark side of the child influencers ecosystem online. Well-meaning parents posting videos of their children to a global audience means they no longer have control over who sees their child, or how anyone reacts. The research suggested social media was ‘reshaping childhood’.
I would typically argue in favour of kids having phones once the family is ready for it, and learning how to navigate social media under a safe roof, with strict rules.
A lot of people argue against this, and one argument that pops up regularly is how tech moguls in Silicon Valley don’t let their kids have phones or internet access. But the other side of the same coin is how many celebrities choose to keep their kids out of the spotlight. How many childhood Hollywood stars grow up and refuse to perform to the point that they effectively opt out of society? I have seen a lot of (insufferable) family influencers proudly say that their kids don’t have phones, yet they have lived their lives within a production since day one.
Social media is reshaping childhood, whether we like it or not, and we won’t fully understand the effects of it for years to come. But common sense should tell us that turning childhood into a performative piece or having kids ‘on stage’ for hours a day, with that stage being their everyday life, should really be ringing alarm bells everywhere.
Maybe now, as we are having so many discussions about if kids should be allowed to have phones, and how they use social media, we could also talk a little bit more about how social media is using our kids.
Margaret Lynch is a busy mum of two, living and working in Kildare.
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