Whether it was how to achieve a smaller waist or the latest food group to avoid, I was consuming a world of disordered eating disguised as self-improvement.
New insecurities appeared on my screen, followed almost immediately by a succession of “solutions” to my body’s supposed flaws. Social media didn’t create every vulnerability I had, but it knew exactly how to feed off them.
That is why I struggle when adults talk about social media as if it is simply a distraction, or a time-management issue, or something that can be solved by putting phones in bags during school hours.
An average 14-year-old in New Zealand spends around five hours a day on social media. In other words, many young people are living a six-day week because so much of their time and mental energy is being handed over to a world that does not really exist.
And the problem doesn’t end when the phone is taken away.
Even when my device was out of my hand, the content stayed with me. While my classmates continued learning, my mind was occupied with calculating the number of calories in my medium-sized apple at morning tea.
School used to offer a break from the online world. But by then, I was mentally absent in the world of “skinny-tok”.
That is what so many adults still do not fully understand. This content doesn’t just sit on a screen.
It gets inside you. It changes the way you think, the way you see your body, the way you relate to food, and the way you move through everyday life.
Now, at 20, I can see the harm I was consuming had become part of my routine.
And I can also see that thousands of other young people are still being fed the same messages, every single day.
We are often told the answer is more education. And yes, education matters. Young people should absolutely be taught how these platforms work, how algorithms manipulate attention, and how false health information spreads.
But it is unfair to expect a 13- or 14-year-old to outsmart systems that have been deliberately engineered to capture attention and maximise engagement.
These platforms are not passive. They are designed to keep us there, to learn our vulnerabilities and to feed us more of what will hold us. It’s definitely not a fair fight.
Children are kept away from other products and environments that are known to be addictive or harmful. You would not let a 12-year-old sit at a pokie machine and tell them to simply “use critical thinking”. So why are we still pretending children can safely navigate platforms built on the same behavioural psychology?
For too long, New Zealand has treated this as something young people should just learn to manage. But “she’ll be right” is not a child safety policy.
As someone who grew up with social media and has lived through the damage it can do, I am asking adults to stop minimising what is happening in front of them.
School should be a place of growth, safety and preparation for adulthood — not a battlefield against toxic messages and unrealistic standards that followed us there from our phones.
If we want a healthier future for young people in this country, we need to stop asking children to protect themselves from systems designed to exploit them, and start putting real protections in place.
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