The Price of a Digital Childhood
Like many of my peers, I got an Instagram account at age 10. What I encountered online went beyond likes and filters.
Listen to the story:
I stepped into my friend’s room, where bright red LED lights bled across the walls. The smell of Victoria’s Secret Love Spell was so strong it clung to the back of my throat. 13 Reasons Why played quietly on her laptop.
She stretched out on her bed, her phone opened to TikTok in one hand and a half-empty Diet Coke sweating on her nightstand next to her. She didn’t even look at me before saying, “Should we hop on Monkey?”
Monkey is an app that throws you into glitchy video calls with strangers, giving you a few seconds to decide if you want to continue talking or swipe away.
“Yeah, I guess there’s nothing else to do,” I said as I sunk to the floor.
We stared at the screen, talking to boys we’d never met — different faces, but the same useless conversations. The calls usually ended with the boys asking for our Snapchats. We always complied.
But when we opened the next call, instead of the usual young faces staring back at us through the screen, we saw an old man touching his penis while moaning loudly. We immediately clicked off the screen and exited the video chat. Time stretched out.
This was something we’d seen before, but it still made me feel sick. My palms were sweaty, and I could feel my heart racing. My stomach ached. What we saw shocked us, but we continued using the app until I went home later that day. I was 14 years old, seeing a 60-year-old man’s genitalia was not on my 2019 summer bucket list.
According to a 2022 United Nations Human Rights Council cyber investigation, during a two-hour test period, researchers connected with 12 men masturbating, eight naked males, and seven porn adverts on Omegle, another popular video call site.
Looking back, I wonder how I reached the point where spending my days hunched over a computer, surrounded by explicit content, became so normal. No one warned us that growing up online meant losing parts of our innocence before we even understood what was being taken from us.
For many people in Generation Z, social media shaped our childhoods. Now, as Gen Z enters adulthood, psychologist and author of The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt, argues we are the most anxious and depressed generation, a trend he directly links to the rise of smartphones and social media. Between 2010 and 2020, depression rates among girls increased by 145 per cent.
I was 10 when I first downloaded social media and 12 when I got a phone. Having a portal to the online world in my pocket didn’t just shape my childhood, it distracted me from it, making me feel like I skipped parts of growing up and didn’t experience regular rites of passage.
Age 10: The Honeymoon Phase
I got my first iPod Touch when I was ten years old. On one freezing winter day that year, I rushed out of school to get home as soon as possible. My urgency to get home wasn’t just because of the weather but because of a new app my friends had been talking about all day: Instagram.
I needed it. I just had to convince my mom to let me download it.
I swung open the door and ran up the stairs to my bedroom as my backpack slipped off my shoulders. I stepped over the Bratz dolls scattered across the floor and climbed into my stuffed animal-filled bed with my iPod Touch.
When I heard the slight hum from the garage door, I went downstairs.
“Please, Mom? Everybody in my class has it!”
She sighed, setting her purse on the counter and taking her shoes off. I held my breath.
“You can only get it if I also get it and follow you,” she said.
I nodded trying to hide my happiness and walked into the living room to set up my shiny new account. I typed in my zazzygirl18 Gmail account and picked the perfect selfie for my profile picture.
I followed everybody I knew. Once they started following me back, I became obsessed with getting the most Instagram followers possible. And so, my relationship with social media began.
2015: My “iPad kid” era
Age 12: Wanting to be seen
Being twelve was uncomfortable. My body was changing, I got my first period, and I felt strange trying to navigate my relationships with boys. Though I felt out of place, it seemed like everyone else my age skipped the “awkward stage.”
The school buzzed with excitement the first day back from spring break in 2016. My friend and I immediately locked eyes when I walked into class.
“Did you hear about the account?” she asked.
My heart dropped as she showed me an Instagram page islandlakescrushes.
Kids from my school would direct message the page with a picture of their crush and a message explaining why they liked them. The account would then post it for everyone to see.
There were already a few people posted on the account with their love notes in the captions. Since my friend was so excited about the chance to be on this account, I didn’t want to show my dread.
As weeks passed, I became increasingly anxious every time I opened Instagram. I was afraid I might see someone else posted on the account. Why wasn’t I getting posted? Was I not good enough? Why did I feel so uncomfortable with myself when everyone else seemed okay? I didn’t get it.
The account eventually became less about crushes and more about mocking people. Kids would send in bad pictures of each other and make fun of their friends or target anyone they considered weird. I had moved on from that particular account, but I was still dealing with insecurity and constantly trying to keep up with the next social media trend.
Haidt refers to the rise in anxiety and depression in Gen Z as “The Great Rewiring of Children,” describing the drastic change when kids traded outdoor playtime for screen time.
As Gen Z became the first people to grow up in the digital world, they experienced the pressures of social media and reliance on smartphones for communication, entertainment, and validation. With access to limitless information and platforms that offer instant connections, social media became both a space for social interaction and a means of escape. The constant need for external validation, coupled with the stress of maintaining a curated online persona, created an environment with many mental health struggles.
Age 14: Snapchat relationships
High school felt like a fresh start. I couldn’t wait to meet my new classmates and forget about the exhausting drama of middle school. I felt like I was in-between being a kid and an adult, and I had much more freedom.
It was October in grade 9 when a boy I’ll call James added me on Snapchat, and we started “talking,” which meant Snapchatting back and forth without ever talking in person. We ate lunch in the same cafeteria and never made eye contact. All of the relationships in my friend group were happening on Snapchat.
My best friend, who I’ll call Anya, and I regularly had weekday sleepovers. One evening, when I got to her house, we lay on her bed talking. Next to us was a half-eaten cake. To All the Boys I Loved Before was playing on her laptop.
My phone buzzed. I opened Snapchat and felt the flutters in my stomach.
It was James. I opened the Snapchat to a picture of his penis. My face burned as I swiped out of the picture and thought of a way to respond that would make me sound cool. Anya kept watching the movie, unaware of what happened.
“Ugh, will we ever find love like this?” she said.
After Anya and I went to bed, I kept getting Snapchats from James. My hands were clammy as I opened the messages, scared of what I was about to see. He wanted to know what colour underwear I was wearing and if I could send him a picture since he sent me a picture. He promised he wouldn’t show anyone.
I thought of my elementary school’s trip to Ottawa the year prior, where the boys in my class whispered and laughed as they traded girls’ explicit photos like trophies. I would never put myself at risk like that.
When I saw explicit photos and videos online, they made me feel uncomfortable and shameful. Though most of my thoughts around these experiences were negative at the time, there was a part of me that enjoyed having access to inappropriate content. It made me feel older and more mature, which is something I longed for.
Social media makes explicit and harmful content easily accessible to young people. Haidt explains that this exposure has led to confusion and shame, as constant streams of curated images, unrealistic beauty standards, and adult themes distort children’s sense of self-worth. Many feel they can’t measure up to the standards they see online, leading to deep feelings of inadequacy.
2019: My “Snapchat filter” era
Age 14: A by-stander to grooming
Anya and I sat at the back of our English class as our teacher annotated an article on the whiteboard. Anya nudged me and flashed her phone toward me. It was a message from “Chris,” an almost 30-year-old she’d been texting.
“Do you think he’s flirting with me?” she asked.
I scanned the words. It was obvious he was.
“You can’t tell anyone, Jenna. Nobody else would understand,” she said.
Chris didn’t seem dangerous or what you expect when thinking of a predator. He was kind and felt like a safe adult.
Every day after that, she would show me their texts. His words were intense and filled with compliments about her body and how she was more mature than other people her age. I knew other people would think it was wrong. But I thought I knew Chris from what she had told me about him. He was a good person in my mind. Most importantly, Anya was happy. That was enough for me to ignore my intuition.
Months later, Anya and I went to a party together. The house buzzed with loud early 2000s’ hits when I noticed Anya wasn’t drinking, which was unusual. When I asked why, she leaned in and whispered, “I took a Plan B yesterday.”
My heart was pounding out of my chest.
She smiled and told me she was in love. From then on, when she stayed at his place, she left her phone at my house to prevent her mom from tracking her location. I protected her and was happy for them.
When I look back at this now, I see the situation more clearly.
I always pictured predators as people who hid in bushes and grabbed you when you walked by. I thought it would be more obvious. Even though I knew Chris and Anya’s age gap was bad, I thought nothing of it because Chris seemed safe. When men would tell us we were more mature than other people our age, it made us feel cool.
Age 15: Pandemic mania
When the pandemic began, I was excited to get three weeks off school. Those first weeks were filled with TikTok dances, whipped coffee, and cloud bread.
But as those three weeks turned into the rest of the school year, things quickly went from fun to depressing. I started sleeping through most of my Zoom classes since I was up late every night on TikTok. Every day, when I would finally leave my room and go upstairs to talk to my mom, I would cry and tell her I wanted to run away. These years were supposed to be the “best of my life,” but I was wasting them away.
I spent my days glued to my phone, scrolling through TikTok as the hours melted away. My thumb moved mindlessly, tapping on video after video, my eyes dry and unfocused.
I was absorbed in the lives of influencers. I felt like I knew them. They replaced the friends I could no longer see during lockdown. Social media was my only connection to the outside world, and I took comfort in it.
Haidt identifies four major harms of social media: social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction. Before the pandemic, Gen Z already spent less time with friends in person than people from previous generations, and during the pandemic, social media use increased, leading to a loss of real-life friendships.
Teens also struggled with sleep during this time. Haidt says smartphones disrupt sleep patterns, negatively affecting mood and well-being. The technology behind these devices triggers a dopamine release, making phones addictive and hard to put down. This constant craving for more validation and stimulation worsens mental and physical health, creating a harmful cycle of dependency.
Age 17: Phone Addiction
By 17, I avoided checking my screen time reports because they only made me feel worse about myself. I was excited about graduating high school but felt like I had traded my real-life friendships for parasocial relationships with influencers who didn’t know I existed.
One day I went to my grandma’s and spent most of the visit sitting on the couch and scrolling on my phone. My eyes were glued to the screen, completely tuned out from the noise around me. I don’t even remember what I was scrolling through.
My grandma shuffled by, offering me some cookies and asking me about school, and I peeled my eyes off my screen for only a few seconds to answer her questions before returning to my phone. I knew it was bad that I was spending so much time on my phone, but I didn’t want to put it away.
The silence in the car ride home was thick. My mom glanced at me a few times, but neither of us spoke. The hum of the road under the tires and the radio were the only sound.
“You were on your phone the whole time,” she said. “You barely spoke.”
I didn’t have an answer. The words burned in my throat, but I couldn’t explain why it was so hard to be present and engaged. I stared out the window for the rest of the car ride, consumed with guilt.
Haidt offers several recommendations for creating healthier childhoods in the digital age. He calls for a “duty of care” — a code of conduct requiring tech companies to protect minors from harmful content. He also proposes raising the “age of internet adulthood” to 16, arguing that children aren’t equipped to handle the psychological effects of social media.
Since many kids bypass age restrictions, Haidt supports stronger age verification to prevent underage access. He also advocates for phone-free schools, believing that removing screens from classrooms would reduce distractions and improve student focus and social interactions.
In September 2024, Manitoba banned cell phone use in schools. Students in grades K-8 are no longer allowed to use their phones at school, while those in grades 9-12 are prohibited from using them during class. The decision was prompted by teachers’ concerns about declining attention spans and the increasing number of students struggling academically. The goal is to help students be engaged and focused in class.
2024: Working on my “mindful-girly” era
Age 20: Now
Reflecting on my childhood and adolescence, I see how growing up in a world where likes and comments ruled shapes how I see myself and connect with others. Getting attention online felt good but often left me feeling empty. The fake positivity was hollow. Knowing social media is designed to be addictive, it’s tough to have a healthy relationship with it. Social media is everywhere, always pulling for our attention and making it hard to unplug. The comparison to how people once thought cigarettes were harmless tracks.
At 20, I often wonder how different my life would be without constant access to phones and social media. Would I be a different person? Would I be happier?
I had my first panic attack when I was 11. I was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder at 16. Even after almost a decade of experiencing panic attacks, each episode feels just as intense as my first.
Lately, my anxiety fixates on how fast time is passing. I ruminate on the loss of my childhood. About once a month usually at bedtime, I spiral into a panic, realizing those days are gone forever. My heart races and breathing becomes a struggle, like the air has thickened. The room spins, and I feel detached from my surroundings like I’m observing myself from a distance.
Once I calm down, I find myself lying in bed, the glow of my phone screen lighting up my face in the darkness. I scroll through TikTok, the endless stream of videos connecting me to others and distracting me from what just happened. My phone is both the cause of my anxiety and my comfort.
At 20, I’m just starting to grieve the parts of my childhood and adolescence that the dark side of social media took from me. Haidt’s research is clear — access to social media does not serve children. I see now that my experience was not my fault. The situations I found myself in were too much for a child to navigate. Now that I’m an adult, I see that. I recognize that being told I was mature for my age says a lot more about the person saying it than it did about me. My hope is that now that we know better, we will do better — for ourselves and for the kids who need our protection.
