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. 

Jacqui’s designer jewellery label Jewels by Jacqueline featured and was a popular stall in amongst the market action.

This year Nourish and The Belle will be providing delicious affordable food as the G2W Festival represents exactly what we and our businesses are about – community, family and education on heath and well being.
 
G2W is the most inspirational festival I have attended to date… a family orientated day designed to celebrate and appreciate all the extraordinary young woman in our lives. It not only embraces and supports our young women but also their parents, friends and/or relatives through what can be a typically challenging time.
 
The concerns that our girls face in the modern world are ever increasing with:

         •   Media pressures
         •   Imposed expectations to look this way or that
         •   The stress of beginning high school
         •   Cyber bulling
         •   Managing a social media presence
 
This is just to name a few. The range of discussion groups and guest speakers are designed to support with these topics and many more.
 
Saturday 9th of January 2016 at Lennox Head Community Centre is an opportunity for families to have a beautiful Belle General feed at a fraction of the price of our café in East Ballina at Shelly’s Beach and is just a great place to get together to support our community.

My 5 kids and I had a ball last year at G2W. My girls particularly loved making their own perfume but also enjoyed the makeup tent and live music. Admittedly, our 3 boys spent most of the time eating but the food was healthy, affordable and delicious, so I wasn’t complaining.
 
All in all the day was informative, fun and touching. A great community event that we, The Belle General  and Nourish are proud to sponsor. This year we will be providing lunch – our awesome nachos being one popular item on the menu, as well as a delicious and nutritious morning and afternoon treats from The Belle Bakehouse. Nourish will be offering fruits, nuts and plenty of healthy snack ideas for your family lunchboxes too.
 
I hope to see you all there!
 
With big love,
Sarah Baldwin and the Team

Throughout my entire career spanning over 17 years, I've seen a substantial intensification of social media and media targeting and being accessed by our kids in more recent years. I've worked extensively throughout many states of Australia and have begun to notice trends that are commonly impacting on our youth nationwide. Throughout my substantial travel and experiences I have heard concerns and comments from children that I feel are important to be shared so that we can stop and reflect on what is really going on for children and young people today.
 
When I often talk about what’s going on for girls today, some people say, ‘yes there’s more technology now but it’s not that different to when I was growing up, we still had peer group pressure and things’. However, as a woman in my thirties and as a teacher working in the area of social and emotional development, I would challenge this.
 
What I am seeing young girls experience today is very, very different to what I experienced growing up at this age. The pressures they are facing and the messages they are getting from a young age don’t stop, it is constant. When they go home from school, the peer pressure doesn’t stop, added to this is the media bombardment and over sexualisation of girls and women.
 
I recently visited a newsagent, and the section of magazines for four to eight year old girls filled up almost half an aisle. When I looked through the magazines most had pictures of models and dolls in very sexualised poses. One colour-in image was the outline drawing of a young girl, pouting and leaning forward suggestively, what was this suggesting to young girls?
The fact is they are invariably going to take on the image, an image that is embedded with a message that says ‘this is what it is to be a girl or woman today’.
 
The impact that modern media, mainstream and social, is having on young girls today is massive. It is a constant pressure and bombardment of images of how they need to be, and it doesn’t stop. It’s 24/7 for their whole childhood, pre-teen and teenage years. It is becoming more and more common for us to accept this as ‘the new normal.’ As a community there is much here for us to look at.
 
Through what girls are sharing they are picking up messages on what it means to be a girl or woman through the internet, tv, movies, you tube, Instagram, Facebook, magazines, film clips, watching older girls, their mum’s and other women around them’.
 
When girls are asked ‘what are some of the messages you receive from this?’, one of the most common responses is, ‘you have to be perfect, everything needs to be perfect, you need to look perfect and act perfect and you need to be super hot’.
 
When I ask, ‘when you look at all these things around you does it change how you feel about yourself? ‘Almost all girls say ‘yes’. They share how ‘you look at that and when you’re not like that, you think that there’s something wrong with you’.

I have heard primary school girls say things like,

She laughed and made a joke about how she didn’t have a big butt and made a sad face, even though she was laughing you could see she was taking all this in and it was having an impact on her self esteem.

Another girl shared that,

When I asked girls ‘do all these pressures impact on your friendships’?
They all laughed and dramatically shook their heads saying ‘YES! It effects EVERYTHING! You never stop thinking that there’s something you have to improve about yourself and your always competing with everyone seeing who’s best’.
 
One girl shared ‘It creates a lot of jealousy in your friendship groups and people try to bring each other down because no-one is ever really happy with how they are’.

Another 10 year old girl said,

I have also heard a girl share how she didn’t want to grow up. When I asked her why she said,

Many girls talk about how they are worried about this idea that they need to be perfect and what they observe in the women they see and the pressure and overwhelm of that is having a major impact on them and how they see themselves.
 
When you hear these comments come out of the mouths of young girls you realise that we have a real problem. It is creating major stress and anxiety in many young people and this pressure is just not just isolated to girls. There is an ever growing pressure on boys too.
 
Boys often share that the messages they receive from media are that they have to be tough, have a six pack, have to like violence, have to treat women mean and be prepared to beat them up and they either have to look good, have great hair and a hot car or if they don’t look good they at least have to have a hot girlfriend. I heard a five year old boy putting himself down because he didn’t have a six pack so he thought he wasn’t as good as his friend. When I grew up this was not on our radar at this age.
 
I hear lots of kids talking about the video games they play, some kids as young as five and six are playing games where their character can buy prostitutes, rape women, verbally abuse them, run them over, bash them up or throw grenades at them and blow them up.

Where have we got to as a society, that we are making and marketing games like this to our kids? They may have a MA rating but children are still a target audience of these games, they have easy access to them and they ARE playing them and they also know that adults made these games.
A 12 year old boy was talking to me about the changes he was seeing in his friends when they played these games and what he was worried about, he said that when he goes to their houses they spend the whole time on games and don’t talk or play with you and then they just get really abusive to their family and everyone around them and its awkward to be around when they do that.
He also said,

To those who say, ‘its just a game and it’s not having an impact’. I say, spend a day listening to the conversations of kids and observing their behaviours after playing these games and you will see it is, it’s having a very big impact, and not one that I am proud of.
 
You really have to imagine what it’s like as an eight year old girl growing up and having your older brother playing a video game in your lounge room where he is raping or bashing women and that’s now just considered a ‘normal game’. Children are very sensitive and take in a lot of what is happening around them, this situation is devastating for a young girl because it violates the trust she has in people and it feels very unsafe growing up in a world where this type of violence is normalised and seen as a ‘game’.
 
Or imagine being a young boy and having your friends get into games like this and thinking that’s how you have to be too, and that’s what you need to be into when everything in you is deeply upset by what you see. But no-one is talking about it and you know that it’s adults who have made these games, so you think maybe it's okay, ‘maybe there’s something wrong with me’. So you go with it, as so many young boys and men do, simply so they are not accused of being called gay. (and the fact that this is seen as a sign of weakness is of course a problem in itself).
 
This pressure for girls to be perfect and to think that abuse of women is normal is everywhere today, it is creating great anxiety, stress and a real lack of confidence and worth in our girls.
 
As a society we really need to come together, get involved and support young girls and boys. We need every girl to know her beauty and deeply value who she is and be comfortable in her own skin and her right to value herself.
 

When you hear stories of girls as young as 10 to 14 years being hospitalised for self harm you start to see the magnitude of this problem and you know that we need to work together to address this. We can’t leave it up to our kids to find their way through this mess.
 
We need programs in schools and communities that support both boys and girls to build confidence in who they are and be able to talk about some of these pressures so that they are more equipped to be able to withstand this and feel solid in themselves.

By Jessica Williams, 18yrs

Recently I was looking online at ‘vintage pictures’ for inspiration of images that I could put up in my room. What I discovered littered between sepia images of flowers, old keys, and the Eiffel tower, was quite revealing: I found articles/advertisements, similar to the one below, for women who have poor body image, advocating weight gain by saying: “Don’t think you’re “born” to be skinny and friendless”…. “If you want to look better by adding desired pounds and inches of welcome weight… try WATE-ON”, and “Men wouldn’t look at me when I was skinny”. In a nutshell these body images show skinny as the undesired body shape and the one to get rid of.

This baffled me, as in my living memory, all I have ever been told and shown in magazines, on TV, etc… is that skinny is the ideal and that one can never be too thin! And this summary doesn’t come close to representing all of the articles, in fact there were many more – it seems that at the time, that was what was ‘normal’ and widespread; that the media portrayed the ideal as ‘curvy and gorgeous’ instead of the current ‘slim and beautiful’.

I had all these thoughts going through my head: who then decides the ‘ideal’? What an outrage…. and…. How can it change with time? But what I could see is that although, yes, there is an ideal that was presented in the media of that time that is different to the ideal that is presented now – it is actually still the same – just two different sides of the same coin! There is the same undercurrent of women being unhappy with their bodies, and that even though some may have achieved the ‘ideal’ (shown in the articles as models for the ‘look’), how could it have satisfied them when the ideal then shifted to the opposite!

It would appear that there was no passing down through generations of how to be satisfied with our body regardless of what’s ‘trending’ and what someone else’s choice of an ideal body image might be.
This leaves us with two important questions:

The latter seems the more obvious choice to me…. And as part of starting (or continuing) this discussion, I would like to contribute that in my experience of women who both dislike and love their bodies – it seems like the dissatisfaction doesn’t actually come from how women look and whether they are curvy or skinny, but from how they live and feel in their own skin on a daily basis.

My experience of women who truly love their bodies (regardless of the ‘ideal’ body image out there) and describe themselves as beautiful even though they may not be size 0, is that the way they live and take care of themselves affirms their body confidence and supports them in every way.

There is also a deep honouring of how they feel, what they feel to do, when they feel to go to bed if tired, and what they feel to eat. And there is a connection or relationship with the fact that they (and all women) are naturally beautiful on the inside – that the amazingness they feel every day that comes as a result of these choices to live in a different way to the trend, can be expressed outwards, and it just so happens that very often this expression through their clothes, makeup and movements, can be truly beautiful.

By Jessica Williams, 18yrs

The weekend before last, I was feeling great in myself, no feeling of self-loathing in sight and whilst tidying my room I decided to go through the clothes in my closet. I was in the mood for a deep clear out, and it was definitely needed!

Around two and a half years ago I put on a substantial amount of weight (around 10kg) and within a number of months another 5kg got added more gradually. This was a consequence of not wanting to move forward in my life, and instead digging my heels in. As a result a lot of my clothes, especially jeans and dresses, didn’t fit me any more. My body image hit rock bottom, and my self-loathing skyrocketed.
Instead of throwing these clothes away I made piles of them and put these piles at the back of my cupboard, so that when I ‘got skinny’ in the future (that was the plan), I would be able to wear them again. Sounds practical and simple, no? Or so I thought..

Part of the reason I was going through my closet was because I have been starting to feel better about my body as I had lost some of this excess weight recently. It did not happen through any crazy diet, such as the one-day eating/one-day not eating, which I had tried before and it didn’t really work for me, or a new and improved exercise routine. All I did was start to make different choices to look after myself, and to do things that make me feel good – super simple. A stark contrast to the regular binges that I used to do almost every night, and the total lack of exercise. But that’s another story…
So, back to the closet, I was going through the clothes and although some of them now fitted me – I didn’t feel any self-applause, and there was no climatic moment, which is what I had expected myself to feel after hardly being able to breathe whenever I tried these clothes on over the past two years. Instead I actually felt unsettled and uncomfortable. But why?

Whilst trying the clothes, I could feel the self loathing that I had been bullying myself with just oozing out of the closet, like I had been holding my self and my body to ransom for all that time, saying “you’re not good enough unless you fit into these clothes”. That’s a lot of times, opening up my closet and instead of looking in my mirror on the inside of my cupboard door and appreciating and adoring what I saw, I was bullying myself in my head saying I was just not good enough.
What I realised is that these piles of self-loathing had just been sitting there in my room and in my mind/body for all this time, and I had been carrying it with me every single day. I can now understand why I have avoided looking at my body so much in the past and have just used clothes to hide in, instead of expressing how beautiful I actually am.

In the week after I cleared out my closet I felt a lot lighter – not necessarily on the scales, but in how I approached each day, and in everything that I did. It was interesting to notice that I enjoyed living in and looking at my body more and more as the week went on – which was amazing to feel, and I felt beautiful not because of how I looked in the mirror or if I fitted into the ‘skinny clothes’, but because of how I felt when I walked, worked and when I spoke.
But at the start of this week, there was a difference. There were those thoughts sneaking in again of, “you should lose weight” or “that’s not good enough”. At first I was annoyed, as I thought I had gotten over this self-loathing issue the week before! However, I realised it doesn’t happen just like that – my closet was just one ‘pocket’ that I had looked at and by looking at it and dealing with it (or at least having a first go, as there is more clearing out to do), it had made a huge difference in my life.
The question then came; what is the next pocket to look at?
I came to an understanding that instead of going the downward spiral way of putting myself down (which I have experienced), and getting trapped in self-loathing I can only grow in how beautiful I feel as a woman if I am prepared to look at what the next thing, in the way of me expressing in full, is there to let go of.

In the lead up to the Girl to Woman festival join us at The Belle General Cafe in Ballina for two late afternoon tea discussions – for young women, their mothers, sisters and friends. These sessions which will take place after the cafe is closed for the days trade, will be held as intimate discussion groups for women and young women aged 13+. 

BOOKINGS ESSENTIAL – 
AS PLACES WILL BE LIMITED. 
See booking form below


Session 1: Pressures, Friends and Everything in between. 
Tuesday November 18th 5pm-6.30pm   
An honest discussion for young women about life and relationships through the teenage years.
Facilitated by Kristy Wood and Rebecca Baldwin – presenters at the upcoming Girl to Woman Festival
 
Session 2: True Beauty and Your Body – Loving the skin you are in.
Tuesday December 2nd 5.30pm-6.30pm ***** NEW START TIME OF 5.30pm (registration from 5.15pm)
Where: The Belle General –12 Shelly Beach RD East Ballina
For ages 13+
What does it mean to cherish and honour yourself and your body? 
What does it look like when you don't? 
From eating disorders to sports obsessions to burying ourselves in books, we look at the many things that we do to avoid appreciating our beauty and our bodies.
Is change possible? Can we love the skin we are in?
How does this look day to day and how does it affect our relationships and our feelings about ourselves? Presented by Kyla Plummer, Rebecca Baldwin and Kristy Wood

Chai Tea and Herbal Teas plus Kyla’s Granola Slice will be available to purchase at a special Girl to Woman promotional rate on the day.

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Limited spaces: book below to ensure your spot.