What if social media is more harming than we realise? Kate Robson shares what happened when her 11-year-old daughter started - and then stopped - using apps such as musical.ly and Snap Chat.

​It’s hard to admit it but I had my head buried in the sand.  I’m talking social media.  My daughter is 11 and in a 5/6 composite class.  She was in grade 5 but will be in grade 6 now.  She has been asking me for Instagram for years.  All of her friends have it.  I have said we will talk about it when she is in high school.  Early into grade 5 though, she started talking about musical.ly – an app where you sing songs and can share them with your friends.  Everyone had it except her. 
 
I said yes we can have a look at it.  It became her favourite thing in the world.  It was all any of the girls wanted to do or talk about.  Make funny dances up, sing to songs and ‘like’ each other’s performances.  Everyone really did have it so I said she could keep it and was very clear that her account had to be private. 
 
I sat through watching those clips she would so buoyantly show me so many times thinking, ‘I really don’t like this, it feels so off,’ but I was taken by her enthusiasm and did not want to take something off her she loved so much.  I also didn’t want her to feel left out or like she didn’t fit in.  She actually said, ‘if I don’t do these things then I will be too different.  I will miss out on all of the talking with my friends.’  I understood that feeling.  Not wanting to be left alone.  The dag.
 
Then one day an 18-year-old friend came over and asked me ‘why is she is on there?’ She told me of her experience of these platforms and the sexual energy that underpins them with young girls and boys singing and dancing to very explicit rap songs and mimicking the very suggestive movements of the pop stars. They then often share these publically. The average age of a user is under 12.
 
We looked through her account. Months after she opened it we realised she had it not set to private. A private account is only seen by friends (a limited audience), so she had opened it up to get more likes. This is by design, the psychological hook of the app, which is like a children’s own ‘top 100 charts’ with them as the stars. Kids only become ‘famous’ on musical.ly if their accounts are public. And so she had turned the private setting to ‘off’ and on her account we discovered that there was indeed a comment from a pedophile. 

By Rachael Kane
Edited by Rebecca Baldwin & Shannon Everest

At a recent 8 year old girl’s karaoke birthday party, a group of young girls stood in front of a mirror, singing into microphones, pouting, flicking their hair and dancing to a popular song, with the telling lyrics – “You don’t know you’re beautiful, that’s what makes you beautiful”. It is easy to pass this off as just another teen pop song, but what do these lyrics really mean? And what effect do they have on girls and young women? Sadly, they imply that having a lack of self-confidence, is what makes a girl beautiful. Effectively, they celebrate a girl not knowing how beautiful and amazing she really is. This is quite astounding.

Misguided song lyrics aside, a girl not knowing she is beautiful is unfortunately nothing new, it feels eons old. Here are some alarming statistics that reveal how girls actually feel about themselves.

7 out of 10 girls believe that they are not good enough or don't measure up in some way. This includes how they look, their academic results, and relationships with friends and family members.

75% of girls with low self-esteem reported engaging in negative activities like cutting, bullying, smoking, drinking or disordered eating.

Taking all of this into consideration, I’m wondering - is it possible that as a society we are encouraging a lack of self worth in girls, without even consciously knowing it? And why is it that we are not comfortable when a young woman knows how beautiful she is? Why would we not encourage and support her to develop this loving connection and relationship with herself? Is there a way we can support girls to truly know that they are beautiful from within, and imagine if we actually encouraged them to know that it’s ok to share this with the world? Even in the face of the ‘tall poppy syndrome’ reactions they might encounter.

About a year ago, I received a call from a friend of mine, Sara Harris who is a Complementary Women’s Health Practitioner. She had recently begun a project called the Girl to Woman Project that was all about supporting the true health and well being of girls in the transition into womanhood. I was instantly interested and wanted to know more. Sara asked if I had a song or could write one that would support the project. Then Sara showed me some interview style footage she had taken of girls speaking about how they feel about themselves and about life, I stopped dead in my tracks. It suddenly occurred to me that I had never fully felt how deeply precious girls and young women really are. When I looked into their eyes all I could see was exquisite tenderness and beauty. A wave of sadness came over me, because I could feel that I had not honoured this in myself as a young woman and that as a society we don’t fully appreciate and nurture these true inner qualities of girls and young women.

Not long after, I sat down with my guitar and the Girl to Woman song was born, it’s a song that holds the same preciousness and beauty that I felt in these young women’s eyes.

‘She’s a delicate flower, blooming day by day and hour by hour, as she takes her next steps, she knows how glorious she is – and she’s turning into a beautiful woman’. Rachael Kane – G2W Song

When I look at what is out there for girls at the moment, there is very little that supports this level of beauty and reflects it back to them. There is so much out there in the media, in music and in role models that is the exact opposite and influences girls to override their natural inner qualities and to be anything but themselves.

It makes sense that if a girl knows how deeply beautiful and precious she is and is confirmed in this as she’s growing up, she will take this with her into womanhood, making choices that are in line with this and be unlikely to engage in the many destructive behaviors we are now seeing in young women.

But we have to be willing to know and except our own preciousness and beauty if we are to be role models to our young. There is a way to be, that reflects to a young woman that it is natural to embrace her beauty and her power and that shows her that she is indeed worth celebrating. And this starts with us.

It might be with a song, it might be simply with a word or a look, but when we know our own beauty, our connections come with the fullness of this and we make a new normal and a new mark for the young people in our lives.

Rachael Kane will be presenting and singing at The Girl to Woman Festival, an initiative of Esoteric Women’s Health, which will be held on Sunday the 18th of January 2015 at the Lennox Head Community & Cultural Centre. It is a community event for the whole family to celebrate and support girls and young women in their beauty and preciousness. The festival has been inspired by The Girl to Woman Project and aims to support girls by addressing topics such as low self-confidence, self-esteem, body awareness, puberty, media messages, role models and healthy relationships. The festival will be offering presentations, workshops, music, exercise, yoga, meditation, a True Beauty tent, free massages and facials, Nourish Café and promises to be a fantastic and enormously valuable day out. To book your tickets go to www.girltowoman.com.au 

This article was published in the Summer Edition of the NR Family Magazine, a local magazine for families living in the Northern Rivers region of NSW, Australia. You can view the article by visiting www.nrfamily.com/magazine.html