Anyone seeking a heartwarming Christmas story might find it in the arc of Esther Ghey’s life – from self-hating teenage single mother with a serious drug addiction to earning a university degree and a well-paid career. That was until February 2023, when her 16-year-old daughter Brianna was murdered by two 15-year-old schoolchildren.

Although her killers were partly motivated by the fact that Brianna was transgender, transitioning had been one of the easiest parts of her child’s life, according to Esther. It was the smartphone Brianna was given on starting high school that triggered her devastating trajectory. A child desperate for attention in the digital world but terrified of the real world was lost in an online realm. Her online role model was a girl who was denying herself food. Esther’s descriptions of Brianna’s violent addiction to her phone and the mother’s desperate attempts to confiscate it will haunt the reader long after they close her book, Under a Pink Sky: A Mother’s Story of Love, Loss and the Power of Forgiveness.

In the week since Australia’s ban on social media for under-16s took effect, the airwaves have thrummed with the chorus of young teenage protesters on the one hand – child entrepreneurs and children who felt the odd one out in school and found their tribe in tech – and a second group of resigned adult voices saying the young will find a way around it, because that’s what the young do. A third group argued that more could be done to force the big tech platforms into line rather than an outright ban. A fourth just wants the ban here,........

© The Irish Times