Inside the world of 'kidfluencers' where children make thousands from social media — at a cost
Inside the world of 'kidfluencers' where children make thousands from social media — at a cost
Children are gathering large followings and earning thousands of dollars through social media influencing — but some warn it comes with a dark side.
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While those are all valid concerns, the focus on direct harms sort of overlooks all the other ways in which social media can corrupt a child. What kind of adult do these children who grow up online, obsessed with the validation and attention of strangers, turn into? There has been a pretty alarming increase in the rates of anxiety and depression among teenagers around the world and it corresponds closely with the rise of smartphones and social media platforms like Instagram. It's really concerning to me that so many parents are not questioning this level of integration within their child's life of products and systems we know can be harmful to fully grown adults and that are intentionally designed to be addictive. The kids in this investigation were extreme examples, but "normal" children are also being exposed to this environment from an early age, with minimal supervision, during a period when we know their brains are rapidly developing and highly malleable. That should concern us more than it seems to.
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It was teenagers born in the mid-to-late 90s who first started displaying this trend so I think you're right that most parents of children today will have either spent all or the majority of their own childhood away free from that combination of smartphones and social media and are possibly more resilient as a result. Jonathan Haidt has also made the point that a lot of millennial parents grew up during a sort of "techno-optimism" era where people genuinely believed that the internet and this new technology was the greatest thing ever for human learning and communication and would bring us all closer together. There hasn't really been any sort of collective pushback against that idea by our institutions until very recently so I think it's understandable that there is sort of a delay in that message filtering back through society to parents.
I was just watching a TV series last night with a typical scene in which a mother was struggling to have a conversation with her teenage daughter because the child was essentially addicted to the social media on her phone. It was played for laughs, and it sort of dawned on me that basically every single depiction of this interaction in media is in a harmless "kids will be kids" sort of way. Like parents are frustrated by it but at the same time it's sort of just assumed that there are no deeper long-term repercussions and that it's just a different manifestation of typical teenager behaviour all generations exhibit. I think that perception is going to be quite hard to change and it probably explains why we've been so slow as a society to wake up to the possible risks despite warning signs that seem increasingly obvious as our hindsight grows.
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