When she was in fifth grade, Scarlett Goddard Strahan started to worry about getting wrinkles.
By the time she turned 10, Scarlett and her friends were spending hours on TikTok and YouTube watching influencers tout products for achieving today’s beauty aesthetic: a dewy, “glowy,” flawless complexion. Scarlett developed an elaborate skin care routine with facial cleansers, mists, hydrating masks and moisturizers.
One night, Scarlett’s skin began to burn intensely and erupted in blisters. Heavy use of adult-strength products had wreaked havoc on her skin. Months later, patches of tiny bumps remain on Scarlett’s face, and her cheeks turn red in the sun.
“I didn’t want to get wrinkles and look old,” says Scarlett, who recently turned 11. “If I had known my life would be so affected by this, I never would have put these things on my face.”
The skin care obsession offers a window into the role social media plays in the lives of today’s youth and how it shapes the ideals and insecurities of girls in particular. Girls are experiencing high levels of sadness and hopelessness. Whether social media exposure causes or simply correlates with mental health problems is up for debate. But to older teens and young adults, it’s clear: Extended time on social media has been bad for them, period.
It wasn’t just secretly, or that secretly at all, but it still stuck with me. When I was 10, I was texting a friend about having started periods, an extremely sensitive topic, and my father grabbed my phone to read who I was texting. It’s been very long since that happened, and I don’t have the best memory, but things like this I remember very vividly. Some kids are more sensitive, and you have to build a strong relationship with them for these things to potentially work. I think there is even a Black Mirror episode on this topic.
There’s also a problem that if the kid does know they’re being monitored, they can and some will figure out how to get past it. I can’t offer an immediate solution, because honestly, social media scape is severly fucked nowadays, but there’s no winning scenario I can think of that doesn’t require one to have an extremely good relationship with their kid. And even then, it might not be enough.
I’m glad I’m both old enough I didn’t grow up with tiktok and the likes, and that I don’t have kids to worry about. Being a parent in this day and age sounds absolutely exhausting and uncertain from multiple modern-world perspectives.
Kudos to any working parent who manages to handle it well and has a kid with a good head on their shoulders.