I didn’t know….now I do. What next…?

Vanessa McHardy is a UK‑ trained Integrative Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist with almost 25 years’ experience supporting children, teens, families, and school communities. She specialises in making neuroscience and mental health practical and accessible, designing award‑winning wellbeing programmes used in schools and organisations internationally. Now based in Aotearoa New Zealand, Vanessa works with councils, NGOs, schools, and families to build healthier, more connected communities, with a strong focus on digital wellbeing and the impacts of technology on child development.

Last week I was at the premier of the ground breaking, illusion-busting “What Happened to Sex?” With Jo Robertson a NZ sex therapist, narrating and asking the questions and sharing the truth of what our young people have experienced regarding sex. I spent most of the programme shaking my head in disbelief at how utterly polar opposite these young people’s experiences of their sexual encounters were to mine.

About 8 years ago I was working with a young person who had a very traumatic background as well as having ADHD and Autism, all of which made them extremely vulnerable as they became an older adolescent, in one session I was encouraging them to take things slowly and enjoy the early first encounters with intimacy by saying they could just enjoy snogging, (remember when you just snogged for hours on a couch at a party, it was awesome), they just looked at me blankly and said

“we don’t kiss”, they do oral sex but not kissing.

This is common amongst sex workers, no kissing, as that is too intimate. Here was a young person at the beginning of their sexual life, and the same rules of being a prostitute were their only experience. It was at this moment I realised I was totally out of step with what our young people were doing and now having watched ‘What Happened to Sex?”, with choking and violence being normalised, 51% of those interviewed for the documentary had been choked and 90% had engaged in rough sex. I am having another wake-up call to just how little I know of what our kids see daily in pornography through their smartphones. The smartphone, that thing permanently attached to our young people, seemingly harmless, but far from it. But what I know now is porn comes to them… while they are sitting on the bus, waiting for you to pick them up from sports practice, or scrolling on the sofa.

It hasn’t been a fair fight, this smartphone and social media cultural shift. We parents, have no experience of this sort of bombardment of pornography and violence, endlessly available at a touch of a screen. The biggest blow as a parent is realising that our children can be served this content without actually looking for it; that, for boys particularly, the social media big tech have designed their content to show them pornography, to serve it to them, along with beheadings….

Because even if they don’t want to see it, they know that they can not look away.

When was the last time you were sent this unsolicited violent content as a parent? No? me neither, I get menopausal weight gain and currently constant reels about lymphatic exercises, I have never seen porn - oh I lie a couple of months ago I was searching up the title of a permaculture movie title 'The biggest Little Farm' and got fully spammed with pornographic images on my phone screen, it was horrifying: suddenly the most explicit content, moving images about six on the screen. That

is the first time in 14 years of being on a smartphone that has happened. So if my experience of using my phone is relatively enjoyable, informative, engaging, and addictive also because that is the only purpose of social media and the attention economy it serves, why on earth would I think my child is being shown horrific content?

Another element we need to acknowledge is that in our current era, we have either both parents working full time or a single parent working full time. This is a seismic shift from the millennia of parenting. Never in the history of parenting have we had parents so overwhelmed by so many factors; throw in a cost-of-living crisis on the back of the Covid years, and life has been genuinely tough for so many. It is hard to resist the tech as a way to get some quiet time in the house. We all get that and understand the reasons, but the problem is that the actual harms and opportunity cost of being online for children, in all facets of life, have become glaringly obvious. As I heard on a webinar with Johnathan Haidt and Jared Horvath - “parents are exhausted and addicted”, that is the other aspect; our own addiction to the devices and the impact that has on our ability to put in the boundaries that are needed.

I will say it again, it has not been a fair fight. As parents, we need to know the facts, which means we have to wake up, watch the shows, and come to the talks that are being put on by the schools by experts with the facts. Facts like a 165% increase in suicide among girls in the last ten years, feelings of loneliness at record highs, and feeling like life is meaningless, along with academic and cognitive decline that is staggering in how much of a cliff it has dropped off. Yet we still have academics who will argue that it is only correlation and that does not prove causation, only adding to the confusion.

How extra confusing in NZ, as a parent, to go to a talk put on by your school (for free) and have Netsafe talking about how the way to connect with your kids is to be on the platforms they are on, i.e Snapchat; send them cute messages and emojis, have fun and put in parental controls. You have to connect through tech is the message from Netsafe. Hmmmmm why would that be the messaging? Could it have something to do with the fact they are funded by Meta? Only 5%, but

still Netsafe are in bed with the industry you are meant to be keeping us [safe] in….

Then you see their poster for Netsafe Week and it is sponsored by Meta, Snapchat, Roblox ( a paedophile hellscape, is what it is known for), Tiktok. Almost all of these big tech companies have been involved in court cases in America where they have been found guilty for knowingly designing harmful algorithms for children.

Currently, Meta is the only one who has gone to court the other two settled out of court, Zuckerburg is so arrogant that he went to court and lost, and with an unusual

show of humbleness accepted the verdict and put into place age restrictions, opps sorry, I slipped into fantasy land there; he of course, did no such thing and is appealing the case. They have been ordered by the court of New Mexico to pay almost a billion dollars in fines that will fund counsellors and education programmes to try and undo the harm done by the company. This is who Netsafe

felt were appropriate sponsors for their work in protecting children online.

Ummmmm, no wonder parents are confused and only being made fully aware of how bad and harmful life online actually is in the last year.

We can not do this alone. And this is where our grassroots parent movement Smartphone Free Childhood NZ SFCNZ really comes into its own. You don’t need to feel alone, because you are absolutely not; we have a great community where you can reach out, and we get stuff done.

Change is coming and we need to harness the power within to meet that change for our children, our precious babies that we held in our arms and vowed to protect with our lives, we have inside ourselves the most powerful Mumma and Pappa Bears who will rip apart anyone who physically threatens to attack them, we need to bring all our anger to Big Tech, particularly Mark Zuckerberg whose famous saying as a company is “move fast and break things” well the things he

is breaking is our humanity and our children and we say “not on our watch, not now we know, you don’t get to harm our kids for profit”.

Let’s get the popcorn ready and watch the demise of Big Tech, because they wholesale underestimated us parents.