My Boring Superpower.

My kids are in early-primary-school and we recently played ‘If you could have any superpower in the world, what would it be?’.

They were desperate for me to reply: “x-ray vision!” or “supersonic flight!”, but I let them down with: “Time travel. I’d go back in time and cancel social media.” 

They looked at me like I was speaking a foreign language and promptly left the game (and the room).

You see, time is nipping at the heels of their lovely, sheltered innocence. Social media isn’t in their faces yet, and that’s how I’d like to keep it for as long as humanly possible.

My son and daughter still believe in the good of the world, the simplicity of their social interactions, and the honesty of face-to-face interactions with their friends. Importantly, they can shut it all out in the comfort of their home when they need some down time. Nothing chases them beyond the boundaries of propriety and tells them things they don’t need and aren’t old enough to hear and see.

Alongside my husband, we’ve worked our butts off to keep devices out of our parenting toolbox, and I’ll be damned if a socially-challenged techie in sneakers and a hoodie on the other side of the world will upend that.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy an Instagram rabbit-hole with the best of them (my disposable income, not so much!) and fully support devices in educational settings. I’m a little young to be a Facebook fan and way too old to know what happens on TikTok. But I’m mature enough to handle the things the tech giants deem appropriate to serve me, and wise enough to move on when something isn’t good for me.

My kids are not.

The time will come when my ability to manage what they see is gone. How will that impact all the hard work my husband and I have devoted to building good little humans not caught up in the rubbish of social media?

We need – with urgency and strength – the changes to social media accessibility the Albanese government has recently put on the agenda.

Current age limits of 13 are laughable. Biology tells us a human brain isn’t fully formed until mid-to-late-20s, especially in boys. You can’t drive a car until 16/17, and you can’t drink or vote until 18. So why is it appropriate, even kind, to put unfettered access to the known demons of social media in a child’s pocket?

Once your kids have a phone connected to the entire world, you may ‘trust’ them to make good decisions based on their short-lived experience and your parenting inputs, but it’s not their responsibility to filter what they see. They’re not capable.

Children will always push the boundaries set in place by parents and teachers, but tell them something is illegal and the cries of ‘why not?’ are silenced. The law clearly carries significantly more weight as a response than “Because I’m your mum and I told you so!”.

So come on Albo. Come on Peter. Introduce the ban and set the age limit to 16. We’ll only be back here in handful of years if you capitulate to 14.