Not So Sweet, Not So Innocent

The rose-tinted view of our childhood is mistaken

Let's set the scene: the year is 2014 and I’m a not-so-fresh-faced 13-year-old. “New BBM pin!” I write on Facebook, clutching my purple BlackBerry to my chest. Within minutes I am inundated with requests, including from my five best friends whose names are lucky enough to feature in my BBM bio followed by an ungodly number of hearts. I join a chatroom consisting of 20 girls and one poor boy from the neighbouring single-sex school. And away we go. Wow. Wasn’t life good?

Looking at the tweens of today, I cannot even begin to compare and contrast my childhood to theirs. Using the latest retinols and Charlotte Tilbury foundation, Generation Alpha would have looked at my Maybelline ‘Baby Lips’, and Trumpian-orange Bare Minerals powder foundation, in disgust. And yet we Gen Zs are the ones who pity them, for, in our eyes, we had a real tween adolescence. One that was trapped in that unforgiving purgatory between childhood and adulthood, that consisted of multiple rounds of Roaccutane and stolen kisses with our crushes around the back of the joint school disco. Evenings spent on the home computer, Nintendo DS, or dripping in sweat to the latest Wii Just Dance; we were just tentatively dipping our toes into the world of Wi-Fi, unaware of the social media revolution that was about to unfurl. 

I was there for the birth of Snapchat and Instagram, and I remember it vividly. Granted they were unusable until I was gifted my first iPhone aged 15, but with Skype being the closest one could get to social media, we were enamoured by this new array of options presented to us. Facebook was uncool. Outdated. Finally, this was something for us. Our parents were oblivious. No rules, no regulations. A new world of online relationships at our nail-bitten fingertips. 

Instagram and Snapchat were just the tip of the iceberg. Who remembers Omegle? The online chat service that allowed participants to video call total strangers until they decided to move on to another for reasons either pertaining to dullness, or an unsolicited nude image. Granted, that's an extreme example. What about AskFM? A platform that allowed users to post anonymous questions on their friends’ accounts. “Do you like Flora?;” “Is Flora one of your best friends?” I would painfully write on their pages, clearly oblivious to the vital anonymity aspect of AskFM. Frivolous and harmless, until it wasn’t. A prime example of ‘what you don’t know won’t hurt you’ — until you did know, and it did hurt you. One just has to look at Tumblr to understand the unglamorous side of this new world: one wrong click and you were thrown down a rabbit hole of photos showcasing skeletal figures and tips for disordered eating.

Thus, it has dawned on me that our picturesque, idealised tweenagehood was not so, well, picturesque, and subsequently it deserves a revisit and reanalysis. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg — all CEOs with strong bans on their children’s usage of social media, despite the fact they carved this Pandora’s box. We mock the hypocrisy and yet they have good reason. Such censorship and awareness are vital in order to navigate this rocky online world — and yet this was sadly not afforded to us as the first digital natives. 

Thus, we mock the iPad kids and belittle their childhood yet, in possessing an online presence and proper understanding of both the glamorous and unglamorous sides of the digital coin, they simultaneously possess a childhood innocence that was unbeknownst to us. So for those of us who, after reading the hundredth story about a tween raiding a Sephora or queuing to buy a Stanley cup, pose the idea of a loss of innocence in the children of today, perhaps it’s time for a rethink. 

Have the tweens of today lost their innocence? Or are we just allowing for a cloud of nostalgia to shroud how un-innocent our childhoods really were? Perhaps we need to wipe away the rose tint from our glasses.

Illustration by: Lauren McAndrew