Why parents should watch Andrew Tate

Kids don't tell their parents about life online. So you need to find out yourself.

A new report from the Children’s Commissioner for Wales has found that only 28 per cent of school children tell their families about their online lives. I strongly suspect it’s the broadly the same all across the UK.

This is both extremely obvious, and extremely worrying. And it gives me a convenient ‘hook’, as we say in journalism, to write something I’ve been planning for a while: about how parents can better understand their kids’ online worlds.  

Obviously it’s completely natural that children wouldn’t tell their parents what they’re doing online. Why would they? I didn’t tell my parents what I was doing at 13. At that age your parents seem clueless (even if they’re not), old, boring, and broadly embarrassing.

Sorry mum, if you’re reading this. I don’t think that anymore. (When I was 13 my mum was considerably younger than I am now. Which I find extremely confusing. She was very old, yet I am still very young. How does that work?)

The big difference now is this. The dangerous and stupid stuff I did aged 13 was roughly similar to the dangerous and stupid stuff my parents did aged 13. Smoking by the bike-sheds. Trying to acquire booze. Fighting. Hanging out with slightly older, naughtier kids. Even petty theft. (At 11 I was caught stealing a WWF figurine from the Woolworths on the Isle of Sheppey. I later learnt my co-conspirator that day ended up in a young offenders institute many years later, for nicking cars.)

My parents, whether I told them or not, had a working knowledge of what I was likely up to. They had an intuition for the sorts of problems I might face. They were able to talk about it in a meaningful way, based on their own experience.

The sudden and dramatic transformation in how and where young people live over the last 15 years means this is no longer the case. The generational cross over is severed. Parents simply do not understand what their children’s private lives are like, the sort of threats they might face. They don’t have the language to talk about it, or the experience to offer sage advice.

Too many parents I know bury their heads in the sand when it comes to their children’s internet use: I just don’t understand the internet. This is deeply unfair on the child. Children come of age in a difficult, wild, and unpredictable place. Lots of parents either pretend it’s not happening, hope Mr Zuckerberg will fix it, or decide they’re too old to learn.

Not good enough! If a parents’ job is to shepherd children safely to the other side, then the very least we can do is understand the worlds they inhabit.

My first book The Dark Net was designed to help. A lot of people thought it was a tabloid expose, a lift-the-lid on the sinister underbelly of the net. But it wasn’t: I was writing for parents, so they might better understand eating disorder forums, or 4Chan, or trolling groups, of buying drugs online, or sextortion, or online radicalism.  

I will never forget an event I did in a school with a mixture of parents and students, aged between 14 and 18. At the time I was one of the world’s leading experts on all things bad online. After the talk – which covered pro-anorexia forums and buying drugs on the Silk Road – the parents were reeling. Stun-gunned. A 15-year-old wandered over and politely told me that my ‘shocking’ talk was actually quite lame. She knew it already, and hoped it might cover the really dark stuff that goes on - so her parents would finally understand it.

I was suitably chastised. However wide I imagine the chasm, it was double.

Anyway, enough lecturing. We need to close this gap, and responsibility falls with the parents. I’m not suggesting you all become world leading experts on social media algorithms or spend 15 hours a day watching TikToks made by AI-armed teens. But you need to be not clueless. You need to have a broad sense of a young person’s online life, and stay within touching distance of it. That way you can better understand the risks, and have more meaningful conversations about it all. As that disappointed 15-year-old explained, even I was behind the curve. But I knew the lingo, the platforms of choice, the personalities, the dynamics. And I had a queue of teens who wanted to ask me about certain things that worried them, because they thought, being much older but not clueless, I might have some decent advice. In my experience most teenagers are looking for advice and help about this stuff. But it can be hard for them to find it.

So what to do? I have five suggestions to up your internet game.

Download and create accounts on the most popular apps

Forget Facebook and Twitter – that’s for us older folk. According to a large survey by Pew, the most widely used online platforms for teenagers (in the US) are, in order: YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram.

You need to create accounts for each of these.

But do not try to find your loved one on these apps, or follow them, or - heaven forbid -try to communicate with them on there.  Ideally, don’t even let them know you have an account at all. Your job is to be a lurker. An egg account that watches but never posts. You are there to simply understand the basic mechanisms of these places: how they work, how they serve content, how they make the user react and feel.

No two users’ experience is the same on any app, because feeds are personalised to each of us, based on our online behaviours and (derived) demographics. I would suggest therefore trying to imitate the likely behaviour of your child, so you can experience the platform as they might.

You know your child’s interests already I assume, so just start clicking on various posts and watching a handful of videos they might like, and then let the algorithm take over. It will start pushing you stuff it thinks you (your child) might want to see.

Sit back, and see what happens next. Is it dangerous? Worrying? Click on a couple of edgy or troubling posts - they will, after all - and it throws up. And most importantly, consider how the content makes you feel. Being bombarded for hours on end with rapid video content. Does it affect your mood? How?

You can read about all this in the abstract, but nothing beats the real-life experience. And then remember that you are a grown adult who has powers of restraint and a well-developed risk register. Your child won’t.