Lea Boyce is a Specialist Family Business Advisor, Facilitator, Director and Diversity Champion with an extensive background working with large family businesses in leadership roles including her own family office, BOYCE Family Office. Specialising in business investments, family office, succession, governance, property development and philanthropy, Lea is particularly passionate about children and women’s issues.
What does this subject mean to you?
LB: When you look at the mental health crisis we’re facing across the generations, particularly among young women, social media is a massive trend that’s taken hold over the last decade. Social media creates unrealistic expectations for our appearance, our success, our lifestyle, which amplifies the anxiety and sense of inadequacy in the world.
AI and deep fakes just create another layer. The statistics are quite incredible and it’s critical that we get to the root cause of the effect of social media and that continual connectivity, including how it comes through schools and into adulthood – it’s impacting young people’s productivity, their leadership development and communication skills, which flows through to future economic outcomes. I think this prolific use of social media by the current school-age generation will have a lot of longer term ramifications throughout families, businesses and society.
What role does social media play in your work in Family Office?
LB: In my role as a specialist family business advisor I get to work with families in business, and the usage and rules around the use of social medial are an ongoing discussion. There need to be guardrails in place in terms of how and where family members share personal messages and pictures. We see kids posting holiday pictures on social media and the next minute their homes are robbed because there’s such a large network of people aware of what they’re doing. Digital platforms such as Trusted Family set up ‘Facebook offshoots’, where families can communicate and share photographs in a safe and private space, so it certainly plays a role in the conversations we have.
How do you moderate social media use in your household?
LB: I have two older girls in their mid-20s, and while they’re not the most challenging age when it comes to monitoring social media use, when they started using social media we had specific rules. One rule was that you can’t be connected with someone on social media unless you would invite them into our home to sit down to dinner with us as a family.
Otherwise you end up with friends of friends of friends and suddenly it is not about keeping in touch with your friends, it’s a different tool and you’re exposing yourself and the family to a wider range of people. We also asked our girls not to post immediately when we’re away, and for a long time we didn’t let them put photos of us as parents up without our permission for professional reasons. We also ensured the highest privacy settings and we always had their login details, under the proviso that we wouldn’t use them unless they gave us cause to.
Are we depriving our children by not giving them a smartphone?
LB: I don’t think we’re depriving them. The reality is that we need to stay more connected and know where our kids are, and that’s where the good old Motorola flip phones have their place! Smartphones do have location devices and that’s also important to some parents, but it’s about managing that and making sure kids know the value of play rather than constantly being on their phone.
It’s also about making them realise that just because they read something on the internet doesn’t necessarily make it true. Sure, it’s a tool but there are other ways to research and understand things, and communicate with each other. We can still write letters! For me, it’s about finding the balance and teaching our children about that balance.
How has social media impacted your family?
LB: I’m fortunate that when something happens on social media that my daughters don’t think seems right, they have always come to me and we’ve discussed it together. So I’m lucky but I have certainly seen an impact in other families. It’s like we’re in the middle of a giant social experiment with smartphones and everything being so digitised and we’re getting this digital fatigue and anxiety, but we have no choice but to figure it out as we go. We’ve got to find the right rules for that particular time, and I think it’s a combination of families and schools having open and honest communication around what is going to work best for our kids to address issues such as cyberbullying and digital fatigue. Are there any positive effects? Absolutely.
From a safety point of view, I think smartphones are great. You can know that your child is safely at school or they can message to tell you that the tram has broken down and they need picking up. Do you think adults need smartphones? I think it’s never too late for us all to step back and reassess our relationships with technology. We all need to make sure we carve out tech-free time and it’s about taking those small steps. We need to encourage open dialogue about mental health and the effects of constant connectivity, and not be shy about making adjustments around the way we work or operate as a family, even if it’s unconventional or inconvenient. I personally get up, go outside and walk around the block a couple of times a day and remove myself from my computer because I know it’s not good for me. As adults we can lead by example, disconnect and be more present.
boycefamilyoffice.com
Greg Attwells is one of the driving forces behind 36 Months, a campaign pushing for the minimum age for social media access to be raised to 16. Head of Communications at FINCH, Partner at 36 Months and a father of two daughters, Greg is just one of the many parents who believe that our kids need more time to be kids.
What does this subject mean to you?
GA: Four months ago we launched a campaign called 36 Months to raise the age of social media citizenship by 36 months, from 13 to 16. What began as a PR campaign for policy change quickly turned into a parent-driven movement, which resulted in elected officials hearing the unignorable chorus of voices from the Australian parent community and have since made a commitment to legislate to raise the minimum age this year, but they haven’t decided how old is old enough so our job continues.
What was the driving force behind 36 Months?
GA: 36 Months was started by two concerned dads with kids in that age range who were finding the daily battle with time limits and access to social media a real challenge. They wondered if they could do something about changing the age to 16, to give parents some air cover. Sure, kids might still find ways around it, but when something becomes a legal issue, it really helps parents on a daily basis. Until now, social media has been given a PG rating, it’s parental guidance recommended so it’s up to parents to police but it’s a very hard thing to manage so we needed the Government to step in, regulate and hold social media companies to a higher standard.
How do you moderate social media use in your household?
GA: I’ve got a 14-year-old and a nine year old, so one very much in the window and it’s a daily battle. It’s really hard when you’re the parent saying no and all of her mates are in these online communities and kids start to feel socially isolated and excluded by not having social media, so when there’s a blanket rule for everyone, it definitely makes it easier. I feel the pain on a daily basis but she’s a good, healthy kid – it’s just addictive. This is why we’re fighting a battle around social media citizenship because it’s gamified interaction, sharing an online persona and opening yourself up to commentary from friends but also from anonymous people. 13 is very young to be doing this. This is what opens the door to cyberbullying and trolling, so that’s why the tagline is ‘Take an extra 36 months to get to know yourself before the world does’. We have downtime and time limits, so no phones after 9pm and a time limit of three hours a day (cumulatively) for both TikTok and Snapchat.
Are we depriving our children by not giving them a smartphone?
GA: Not at all. It’s no secret that social media is an insecurity amplifier. It’s making us miserable let alone what it’s doing to our kids. Excessive use is rewiring young minds within a critical window of psychological development and it’s causing an epidemic of mental illness. The Government has made social media a communications issue, but we believe it’s a health issue. We’ve tried to run this campaign on this message, that it’s a health issue. We’re not anti-tech, anti-phones or even anti-social media, we’re just for healthy teen development and social media was one of the biggest things impacting that, which is why we went after it. Now that we’ve got 36 months back for families, we can use this window of time to build self-esteem, belonging and self-discovery.
Are there any positive effects?
GA: Of social media? No. Of a smartphone? Yes, there are some. At 36 Months we made the decision not to fight the smartphone war, because it didn’t feel like a war we could win but we felt like we could aim at social media and really make a difference. The things that kids need most when they’re young teenagers is cultivating things like self-esteem, resilience, a sense of belonging and compassion for themselves and for others. I don’t think social media helps with any of these things, I think it undermines them.
Do you think adults need smartphones?
I don’t think we need them. I think we could do our jobs and exist in the world just as effectively without them. We just visited a bunch of schools in Sydney to try and capture the youth voice on this issue and one of the questions we asked the kids was ‘Hands up if you think your parents spend too much time on their phones’ and all the hands shot up. So I don’t think we’re role modelling the best behaviour and I think our connectivity online has made it very hard for us to disconnect from work and show up wholeheartedly for our families. We also asked Year 8 kids how many of them would be okay if social media didn’t exist in their world and all the kids put up their hands. I think there’s a lot of social pressure and fear of missing out is the main driver, but if nobody was on it, I think they would all breathe a sigh of relief.
What’s next for 36 Months?
GA: We still have a job to do to push the Government to take a courageous course of action and raise the age of access to 16. Then the shift for us becomes focused on healthy teen development and we’re working with parents and educators to better cultivate the tenets of wellbeing such as connection, compassion, community, self-esteem, belonging and resilience in kids between the ages of 13 and 16.
36months.com.au