Analysis: The constant, exhausting battle we can’t stop fighting

What young kids and teenagers do and see and learn on their screens is truly terrifying, which is why parents need to stay on top of children’s screen time, writes Elissa Lawrence.

Parenting is a hard job. It always has been and always will be. But raising this generation of tweens and teens is different because, as digital natives, they only know life surrounded by and immersed in technology.

As a parent to three teenagers, keeping an eye on all that technology use is nothing short of exhausting. The average screen time for Gen Z (born 1997-2012) has been measured at 7.3 hours a day. But it can be even higher for some teens with a recent survey putting it as high as 76 hours a week or about 10 hours a day, with the majority of that time spent between two social media applications, Snapchat and TikTok.

This is important because what young kids and teenagers do and see and learn on their screens can be truly terrifying.

Andrew Tate might be the misogynist of the moment but, disturbingly, he is not the only one. There is a big bad digital world of anti-woman, anti-feminist, alpha male, extreme misogyny out there.

And it’s not even something young boys and girls have to go looking for. Most teenagers have TikTok with its short, sharp videos that are designed for sharing. They see a video once, say of Tate, and the app’s algorithm steps in to inundate them with similar content.

The mobile phones our children carry everywhere are a powerful device, used for good but also bad, capable of delivering all sorts of inappropriate influence into the privacy of our homes.

Parents know they need to be on top of their child’s screen time but aside from taking away the device altogether (you might as well be chopping their arm off), it is almost impossible to keep a track of their every click and view.

It is a constant, exhausting battle but one that is too important to surrender.