What do our early teens do in the digital shadows?

The parent of children entering their teens soon learn they are operating in an environment fraught with hidden dangers.

We can be reasonably certain teenagers do not turn into vampires, but what 12 to 14 year olds do in the digital shadows should be one of the hazards on parents’ danger lists.

Last week, funding agencies NZ on Air and Te Māngai Pāho released the results of research – undertaken by Verian on their behalf – that provides numerous insights into children’s media use. It is part of the ‘Where Are The Audiences?’ series of studies that provide broadcasters and content providers with invaluable information that can inform future inputs and outputs.

The research is based on insights from media diaries to capture children’s media use across a week, 20 two-hour in-home interviews in five centres across the country, and a quantitative survey of 1024 parents and their children. You can access the reports here.

Among the findings was a clear need to do more to attract early teens and their younger siblings to local content. They are more drawn to trendy offerings on international platforms, particularly YouTube.

As a result, NZ On Air has announced the launch of a new hub for local children’s content on YouTube and YouTube Kids called KIDOGO.

Content funded by both agencies can now be found on two YouTube channels aimed at distinct age ranges. KIDOGO Junior has content for pre-schoolers, while KIDOGO is aimed at primary-school kids. The channels provide an additional avenue for content discovery, complementing local platforms.

The logic appears to be that, if children are attracted to local content while at primary school, they will continue that interest into their teens and beyond. It is sound thinking.

The research also contains warning signs over unsupervised online activity as children get older and enter their teenage years.

Sixty-nine per cent of children access material on YouTube and more than half are watching for more than 70 minutes each day.

More than a quarter also access video content via social media. In the early teens, around thirty per cent are using either TikTok or Snapchat, with a further 20 per cent on Instagram. These platforms each have forms of encryption and Snapchat has an additional “My Eyes Only” secure vault where users can hide Snaps and Stories behind a passcode for extra privacy.

Smartphone use is high across all demographic groups and more than half in the 12-14 year old age group use them to watch YouTube. More than a third use laptop or desk computers for their viewing. In other words, these teens are likely to be watching alone.

Few are watching the children’s platform YouTube Kids. By the time they reach the 9-11 age group, almost two-thirds are watching the general YouTube platform and this rises to 70 per cent for early teens. By that stage 37 per cent have their own YouTube account.

And therein lies the danger.

The survey shows that across the three surveyed age groups, 43 per cent of children mostly choose what they watch, although there are some boundaries. These can be set in YouTube’s Family Centre. However, by the time they enter their teens, 30 per cent choose content with no parental controls whatsoever.

What might this mean?

I opened the YouTube app and typed “violent movie” into the search field. Among the offerings was ‘Gang Law’, described as “An ex-mercenary goes undercover in an urban high school to avenge the death of his brother”. Then I typed ‘adult movie’ and at the top of the list was “Erotic, Best sexx scenes ever movie collections”. I was on a roll. I typed in ‘alt-right movie’ and was rewarded with “The Alt-Right Playbook: How to Radicalize a Normie”.

And such searches will not be closely guarded secrets. More than a third of 12-14 year olds watch videos that friends or family show them or talk about. Imagine chatter about “Erotic, Best sexx scenes ever movie collections” among adolescent boys in the schoolyard.

That’s what it means.

We should not, however, rush to heap blame on parents for failing in their duty of care.

In single parent households, children often consume media independently and exercise more personal choice because there is less oversight, particularly if that single parent is working hard to make ends meet. In households with older siblings, choices may be shaped in ways that gain approval from an older brother or sister. And as children get older, there is a tendency for parents to take a reactive, trust-based approach as their offspring develop and affirm their own identities. They are not always monitoring closely, and can feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume, speed, and variety of content. Most parents will only step in when they catch a glimpse of something they don’t like or that doesn’t sit right.

Parental attitudes also differ from one household to another. The research quotes a 12-year-old boy talking about the types of video games he plays: “When I go to my friend’s house, we play Fortnite, which I’m not allowed to play at home. But my friend’s mum lets me play.” On the same page a male caregiver says: “We’re trying our best… and we’reall learning, but it can be hard to keep up.”

I sympathise and, to be honest, I do not know where the answers lie. I do know, however, that the brain of a child under the age of 14 does not have the cognitive capacity to make choices that keep them from the sort of harm that might result from watching unsupervised adult content.

The University of Rochester Medical Center sums up the teenage brain rather well.

It doesn’t matter how smart teens are or how well they scored in tests. Good judgment isn’t something they can excel in, at least not yet. 

The rational part of a teen’s brain isn’t fully developed and won’t be until age 25 or so. 

In fact, recent research has found that adult and teen brains work differently. Adults think with the prefrontal cortex, the brain’s rational part. This is the part of the brain that responds to situations with good judgment and an awareness of long-term consequences. Teens process information with the amygdala. This is the emotional part. 

In teens’ brains, the connections between the emotional part of the brain and the decision-making center are still developing—and not always at the same rate. That’s why when teens have overwhelming emotional input, they can’t explain later what they were thinking. They weren’t thinking as much as they were feeling.

And there is an additional problem: They may not be capable of sound judgement but they can be cunning. In a One News item last Saturday on the latest school online security systems, Newlands Intermediate School deputy principal, Simon McAtamney, admitted that pupils set up their own Virtual Private Network or VPN accounts. A VPN account is a user login for a  service that encrypts the internet connection, hides the IP address, and creates a secure, private tunnel for online activity. Mr McAtamney’s pupils would typically be aged between 11 and 13.

Australia’s ban on use of social media by under-16 year olds comes into force next month. Among the services that fall under the ban are TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, X,  and YouTube (which restricted teen access in July in anticipation of the new law).

A New Zealand private member’s bill introduced by National MP Catherine Wedd, which would mirror the Australian ban, was drawn from the ballot last month. So we may see some measure of control over what our young people can access.

However, doubts remain over the ability of law to contain the curiosity of the young. If intermediate school pupils are already using VPN accounts to circumvent controls, will their ingenuity find a way around a ban?

When the National Party announced on its Facebook page that Wedd’s Bill would come before the House, a follower commented: “To be fair, it didn’t stop us when we were 11 and the minimum age to join socials was 14”. It was accompanied by an emoji laughing hysterically.