As a parent I’m gobsmacked by what some other parents do with regards children and information technology. Maybe it’s because I’m a slightly older than average parent who didn’t grow up with the internet in the home but I see nothing good that could come from giving small children unrestricted access to the web and in particular social media.

The internet can be both the greatest library since the one in ancient Alexandria or a festering cesspit of nasties that needs to be kept well at bay and away from children. Because the web is both of these things I cannot understand the mentality of parents who not only give their children smartphones and other web enabled devices that the kids can use unsupervised, but also allow them to create their own social media accounts on places like Tik Tok. Parents who do this are basically allowing everyone from nonces to grifters and loopy ideologues to the Chinese Communist government to bring up their children and harvest their personal data.

Therefore I was shocked to read an article by Frank Young over on CapX about the blasé attitude of some parents towards technology which has reached the point where five and six year olds have their own smartphones and nobody questions whether this is a good idea or not. According to the CapX article approximately 20% of children in this age group have mobile phones. This is astonishingly worrying as because these devices are very portable it’s more than likely that the parents have no idea what their children are doing with them.

CapX said:

Every year Ofcom, the media regulator, conducts a survey of media usage in our homes. Every year they discover that children not long out of nappies are being given phones and profiles on social media sites. The latest survey shows that parents are actively aiding and abetting this practice by enabling their children to set up profiles. No government bill can legislate for parents simply not taking responsibility – and we shouldn’t be afraid to say that.

This time researchers at Ofcom have found that eight in ten eight to 12-year-olds have a Snapchat account and two thirds are on the video streaming platform TikTok. Half of these primary school aged children admit that their parents helped them set up an account. Others may be going behind their parents’ backs, with three quarters of under 12s saying they lied about their birth date when signing up to TikTok and Snapchat.

I can’t imagine why any responsible parent would set up a social media account for an eight to twelve year old. It’s an incredibly stupid thing to do as it allows a child access to a whole universe of age inappropriate material as well as those who wish to manipulate children for their own ends. Nothing good comes of this. It can end up exposing children to worryingly extreme pornography which is likely to warp their view of sex and relationships when they get older and allow access to children by those with ill intentions or an ideology to push. Nonces will use any way possible to gain access to children and young people and the internet is a fertile ground for social contagions such as the Cult of Trans to spread within certain cohorts of young people such as pubescent girls struggling with bodily changes.

I agree with the author when they say that this is not something that can be sorted out through legislation as in many cases according to the author it is parents who are giving access to the web and assisting their children in registering for social media platforms. Legislation can and will be circumvented by parents in the face of pestering from their children to register them for this or that social media platform. What gets me is that there must be a lot of parents who must have at least in part grown up with the internet but still allow access by their children to the web. For example a person born in 1980 -85 who is now a parent would have been a teenager with awareness of the internet during the dial up years which means that they must be cognisant of the nature of the internet. Yet these parents from this cohort who might have had kids in their twenties or thirties who must know of the problems of questionable content online, still give their kids full access to the internet through smartphones. This is not in my view good parenting.

Maybe, as the author suggests, legislation might be less effective than messaging about why it’s stupid and dangerous to let children roam unaccompanied, unfiltered and unguided on the net. Things change and what is socially acceptable changes. For example when I was a child it was relatively normal for children whose parents had Ford Transit vans to be driven around by parents with the kids sitting in the back on upturned milk crates. Whilst I acknowledge that this is now illegal more importantly it is currently socially unacceptable to do this. It’s quite possible that with information and guidance from schools and organisations catering for children and young people as well as from parental peer pressure, that giving children unfettered access to the web and giving five year olds mobile phones, could become as socially unacceptable as plonking your child on a milk crate in the back of a van in order to go to the shops.