Being a parent of a tween in the 2020s is to be caught between two opposing forces. On one hand, you have your beloved offspring, constantly campaigning for more access to social media. It doesn’t matter how often you say “You have to be 13” they will endlessly tell you how ALL THEIR FRIENDS have access to it, and you’re killing their social life, and you just don’t understand… And all this before they enter their actual teens.

And on the other hand, you have the constant drumbeat from an increasingly strong movement wanting to get phones out of school entirely, let alone social media. A WhatsApp community called West Sussex Smartphone Free Childhood is a busy hum of activity, with new schools joining, and the campaign groups putting pressure on other schools organising and campaigning.

My daughter (12, keen to get TikTok and WhatsApp, not yet allowed) might not take these campaigns seriously. After all, her experience of secondary school has always included phones. But she should. As the new Accenture Life Trends report makes clear, this is not a trend that is going away anytime soon:

In the UK, St Albans is set to become the first city to be smartphone-free for all children under 14, and a number of London schools are seeking to follow suit. In February 2024, the French government passed a law to protect children on the internet, specifically on social networks.

Are today’s teens the anxious generation?

The trend has accelerated in 2024 thanks, in part, to a single book. It’s a book that parents pass between each other, like a quasi-religious text:

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s best-selling 2024 book, The Anxious Generation, has whipped up a visceral sense of urgency around young people’s well-being. In it, he shares statistics that show significant rises in teen depression, mental illness among college students, anxiety among 18- to 25-year-olds and hospital admissions for self-harm and suicide among younger adolescents. These concerns have surged since 2010–2012, which coincides with mass smartphone adoption, a sudden engagement spike on social media and business models that have increased screen time.

However powerful the book’s impact has been, it’s riding the zeitgeist. And it’s doing that despite the academic voices that disagree with its core message. danah boyd has been researching the impact of the internet on teenagers for around 20 years.

Navigating risk and harm for teens

She recently wrote about the fact that the discussion around teens and social media tends to conflate risk and harm. And, she points out, teens have to navigate many risks, from independent travel to early sexual encounters. We do everything possible to minimise those risks and prevent undue harm from coming to our youth.

Social media, she suggests, is risky but not inherently harmful:

Can social media be risky for youth? Of course. So can school. So can friendship. So can the kitchen. So can navigating parents. Can social media be designed better? Absolutely. So can school. So can the kitchen. (So can parents?) Do we always know the best design interventions? No. Might those design interventions backfire? Yes.

Does that mean that we should give up trying to improve social media or other digital environments? Absolutely not. But we must also recognize that trying to cement design into law might backfire. And that, more generally, technologies’ risks cannot be managed by design alone.

This, she and others have suggested, has taken on the tone of a moral panic. Our children are at risk, so we must remove or ban that risk, or so goes the logic. But a more sustainable path would be to educate our teens, while also looking at how we design our digital products. We’ve written before about dark patterns built into digital design like the ludic loop.

With a backlash well underway, we would be well advised to abandon them, before we’re forced to. After all, yesterday’s teens are already taking this into their own hands.

The complexities of today’s teen experience

And the teens of today might well end up following the path of the teens of a few years ago. I teach undergraduates about social media in a journalistic context. Each year I ask my (admittedly small) sample size of around 40 students who are generally 18 to 20 years old, how many of them use social media. Few of them touch Facebook: “too many Facebook Mums” and “Why would I go where my racist uncle is?”. If they do so, it’s all about Facebook Marketplace. Fewer still go anywhere near X. They are to be found networking on Instagram, and consuming media on TikTok, but they live much of their social life in messaging apps. And my sample is far from unique.

They have seen the consequences of public social media, and they are saying “no, thanks”.

It is, of course, worth remembering that the current generation of teenagers has also lived through other unprecedented events. Many of them suffered social isolation through lockdowns at a crucial time in their social development. It is difficult to untangle this complex web of influences.

But, practically, it doesn’t matter. The idea that smartphones in general, and social media in particular are now a significant source of social and mental health issues for teens, has established itself. Those working in the digital space need to take that into account.

Navigating the post-digital generation

There are two groups of potential customer groups to consider here. There are the children, the nascent consumers, who might well be deprived of traditional channels for longer — and who might then reject them themselves as they grow older.

And then there are the frazzled parents, navigating this horrible, trap-strewn path:

At the center of this trend is a generation of parents trapped between the imperative to protect their children from harmful parts of the internet, while cutting them off completely would remove opportunities and the ability to fully live in today’s society.

The brands that react to this trend by assisting both groups to achieve what they want with an acceptable level of risk will prosper. Those brands who have made token, ineffective gestures towards such assistance are likely to suffer reputational damage it might take a decade to undo.

And it’s no longer safe to assume that today’s teens will age into digital behaviour patterns similar to their parents, or even the generation immediately before them. Once again, we have to accept that change is the new normal, and plan for shifting behaviour patterns.

Time for brands to choose, and choose wisely, just like us parents of tweens.