The social media ban has been launched with the presumption that our children, having been thrown off of the internet, have got somewhere else to land.
They do not, irrespective of claims from the government. Every element of infrastructure that made that childhood possible has vanished, been degraded, or been wholesale replaced by online equivalents.
I lived the kind of pastoral 1980s upbringing which everyone else is elegising: rural Worcestershire, bicycling down to the local library for knowledge, bird watching and sticking 2p coins into phone boxes at the pips to get my parents to pick me up, buses to the local town to scouts and tabletop gaming clubs, and dark starry skies and stargazing with plenty of fresh air. Kid’s TV like Blue Peter and WhyDon’tYou with SAE envelopes to get free activity advice from the BBC.
Leaving aside that it would be / was a depressing and terrible and isolating experience for anybody who was even mildly neurodiverse – ignoring that – go and reread that paragraph and notice how much of it doesn’t exist anymore.
Successive governments of the past 40 to 50 years have slaughtered local bus services; I live in a large village / small town of 6,000 people and if we are lucky there are two buses per day. Rail services have also been slashed. Cycling is considered dangerous unless you’re 40 years old and covered in Lycra. Walking is suspect.
Libraries are a skeleton of themselves and a substantial amount of their provision is online. They are still staffed by amazing people who do amazing work and pursue getting you stuff that you need within a one week window … but that’s not going to compete when the rest of the world has instant downloads to their Kindle or Audible. We shouldn’t be turning our children into their captive markets.
Phone boxes don’t exist anymore, neither as communications solutions nor as social nuclei for loitering. Of course the kids can still have phones but that just means THEY WILL SEND SMS WHICH WILL NOT REALLY HELP MANAGE THEIR SAFETY – and in any case you should have really just gotten them a basic phone rather than an iPhone if you are worried about them using Instagram.
Scouts? Yes they still exist but they are in crisis, they don’t have enough volunteers and there are – as with sports clubs – equally huge safety hurdles for anybody who interacts with children: if the government expects there to be a sudden surge of demand for youth clubs they are going to have to provide for a sudden surge in demand for DBS checks.
And all of the gaming clubs? They moved online years ago and now you are killing access to their modern equivalents. I am fortunate to live in an area where there is a tabletop gaming cafe 4 miles in one direction and 9 miles in another, but again there are no buses. Should I expect teenagers to cycle along the A30?
Also: when’s the last time you ever heard anybody talk about “stamped self-addressed envelopes”? The postal service is now massively expensive and you’ll have to go begging your parents for stamps if you want to send anything anywhere. You should be using email or WhatsApp instead, and in any case you get suggestions like that from websites not TV programs.
We are not in the 1980s anymore and we cannot force kids into a 1980s upbringing. Aside from the fact that in reality it was never the halcyon BMX childhood that people are remembering, we have killed or replaced all of the infrastructure which enabled it.
And I still don’t have a Blue Peter badge, although I did get a competition winner badge once.
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