This generation of parents have gone above and beyond to make childhood safer: using location-tracking apps, thinking carefully about sleepovers, knowing who their children are with and where they are going.

Risk in the physical world is now managed with unprecedented care.

Yet at the same time, many children are being given unrestricted access to a digital world that is largely unregulated, commercially driven, and developmentally mismatched to their needs.

As a child and adolescent psychotherapist, this is the contradiction I see daily: we monitor our children’s movements, but often not the environments their phones take them into.

Social media’s impact on the teens I work with

Adolescence is the period when young people form identity through peer feedback and social comparison. Social media amplifies this process dramatically.

Large-scale studies link heavy social media use with increased rates of anxiety, depression and loneliness, particularly among teenage girls.

What’s striking in therapy, however, is that many young people don’t come in saying “social media is harming me”. For them, this level of visibility feels normal, it’s simply the water they’re swimming in.

They often describe the pressure to respond, to stay connected, to manage friendships online as “just how things are”, rather than something that can be questioned.

It’s usually only when we slow things down that the impact becomes clearer. Young people begin to notice how tiring it is to always be reachable, always aware of how they appear, always slightly on edge about what might be said or shared next. Conflict no longer ends at the school gate. It follows them home, into their bedrooms, and onto their phones late at night.

In clinical work, certain themes recur with striking consistency:

• Cyberbullying that feels inescapable because........
  

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