Principal’s Post on Empowering Young Women
Since 1935, Our Lady of Mercy Catholic College has held a legacy of instilling the values of leadership, excellence and service, nurturing confident young women. We empower our girls to make their make on society with confidence and compassion.
As parents and carers, it is essential that we stay informed about the influence of technology and screen time on our children’s wellbeing and development.
To support this important conversation, I encourage you to read the following article, published in The Australian on August 15, 2025, which explores:
Screen addiction is real – Teens feel overwhelmed by constant scrolling, with many admitting it affects their focus, motivation, and wellbeing.
- Mental health is declining – Anxiety, depression, and self-harm rates among young people have surged, with social media a major contributing factor.
- Social media is engineered for engagement – Apps like TikTok track every interaction to deliver addictive, personalised content that keeps teens online.
- Teens share more than they realise – Personal data is used to shape behaviour and spending, making them vulnerable to manipulation.
In my upcoming Principal Post in Week 9, I will build on the ideas presented in the article below and share reflections from adolescents themselves about how technology is shaping their daily lives, relationships, and learning.
No phone for a week? I’d rather die.” Tara, Mila and Kayla, best friends aged 15, have just discovered their week-long holiday camp in the West Australian wonderland of Shark Bay is going to be phone-free. “You’re kidding, right?” Peak excitement about seven days of kayaking, fishing and camping collapses into horrified silence. “Next you’ll be telling us there’ll be no phones on the bus,” says Mila. I smirk. The girls groan. “No way!” The bus ride is 14 hours. This is a Gen Z catastrophe.
But three days out from departure, I ask the trio how they’re feeling and it’s not what I’m expecting. “I’m so excited to miss out on seven whole days of social media,” says Mila. “I’m gonna get my life back. I think it’ll make me really happy. When I’m on my phone I’m so lazy. I’m just in that cycle of endless scrolling.” All three nod vigorously. “I can’t wait to have all this time with my friends I’d usually spend on my phone,” says Tara. “I can’t wait to be in nature. To feel better about myself. To be free.”
These are smart, sweet girls from solid families. They turn up to school, play sport, do their homework, hang out with friends. All three are in robust physical health. But like teenagers across the Western world, they’ve grown accustomed to carrying with them, at all times, a portal into a parallel universe – their smartphones. The tech behemoths of TikTok (video reels), Snapchat (messaging) and Instagram (reels and posts), give teenagers the very things they crave but don’t have: status and control.
Social media is the biggest change to teenage life in 50 years. “To have something so entertaining just sitting there next to you, you know, begging for your attention – it’s like a drug,” says Mila. “And there’s not a lot of reasons to shut it out of your life because absolutely everyone is stuck to their phones – it’s your one source of information, it’s how you communicate with friends.
Kayla has had a smartphone since she was nine. “It’s such a normalised thing to be constantly on your phone,” she tells me. “But like, it’s really bad for you. When I see how many hours I’ve been scrolling, OMG, that’s so much of the day I was just sitting doing nothing when I could have been doing better things. It’s kind of worrying, you know, especially for my generation, because we’re growing up like this is normal. It’s not. It’s scary.”
Tara, too, is dismayed by her dependency. “We need it for entertainment, but it makes me lazy and unmotivated and that scares me. My attention span is dwindling so fast, I’m kind of freaked out because it affects my study. I can’t concentrate. My phone’s like a magnet. I’m permanently distracted and then I feel really bad about myself.”
Nine months ago, I began interviewing Australian teenagers about how they feel about themselves on social media. Why? Because no one was asking them. Rates of depression and anxiety in adolescents are in hyperdrive, and seeping down into childhood: Australian emergency admissions for self-harm in girls aged 10 to 14 has more than tripled since 2009. The suicide rate among teenagers aged from 15 to 19 is now double what it was in 2005. Young men have become less likely to hurt each other and more likely to hurt themselves.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 29 per cent of girls and 17 per cent of boys aged 15 to 24 were diagnosed with depression or anxiety in 2023. The current generation of teens is on track to become the loneliest and most socially isolated cohort in human history. The data is grim. Our kids are not OK.
And, here’s the thing: they know it. Kids born this century are well aware they’re the guinea pigs of a giant psychological and commercial experiment to keep them wired at all times. The roller rinks, pool halls and milk bars of previous generations have been discarded in favour of virtual hangouts on apps, platforms and websites. The open secret among the under-16s is that they already know social media makes them feel bad about themselves. They just don’t know what to do about it.
Every interview and portrait on these pages has been vetted and approved by a parent. The majority of these mums and dads, from across private, public and disadvantaged schools in three states, say they feel helpless to separate their children from their phones.
And not one child I interviewed hesitated to admit they were “addicted” to their screens. “Totally,” says Mila. “I only know two or three girls out of a hundred who’d say they aren’t – and they have really strict parents.”
The interviews conducted for this story with young people aged 10 to 19 have been unsettling and, at times, alarming. One 10-year-old blithely tells me he’s “super-addicted” to porn and “funny racist reels”. A trio of Year 8 boys in Adelaide’s Mansfield Park giggle with self-consciousness when one of them says: “The best reels on TikTok are the beheadings. Girls hate it when we share those.” “Yeah,” adds one of the boys, Elijah, aged 12, “You can watch funny fails of people dying in dumb ways. Like in car smashes.” All three snort their agreement. Jett, 13, pipes up with the understatement of the day: “I reckon our generation’s gonna be messed up.”
Anika, 15, from the coastal suburbs of Perth, says her phone addiction has become impossible to manage. She points out that kids have had free reign on social media for a decade.
“We’ve watched anything, any time we want. Like, I was only ten when I saw porn for the first time, and I was so shocked by it but then so curious that I got low-key addicted for a while and had to talk to Mum about it. Which makes me worried about what my little brother will be watching soon – he’ll be getting hold of porn and thinking weird stuff is OK.”
Anika shows me her screen time from a recent weekend: “Friday, eight hours 57 minutes.” She gasps. “Saturday was nine hours 31 minutes – look! I stayed up on TikTok until 2am. I can’t last a day without it. Probably not even an hour. To delete that would be like turning off my life support. It’s like an oxygen tube to my friends because my phone is my real life more than my actual life. Unless everyone stops, there’s no way any of us can stop.”
Is rampant social media use the root cause of the mental health calamity? It could be argued that the teenage years were always volatile. It’s the nature of adolescence, right?
But psychiatrists agree that social media is producing a teen culture that is brutalising and isolating. Last September, the global Lancet Psychiatry Commission published its finding that young people’s mental health has entered a “dangerous phase”, concluding: “Now might be our last chance to act.”
Tech giants, their lobbyists and enablers dismiss these concerns as overblown moral panic, insisting that social media is for the most part blameless – better still, it fosters connection. They argue that any government regulation of social media disempowers young people.
And yet, if today’s teens are more digitally connected than ever, why are they suffering an epidemic of loneliness – a crisis that eclipses the teen angst of any previous generation? Evidence shows the launch in 2007 of the first iPhone with its inbuilt “selfie” camera, followed by Instagram (2010), Snapchat (2011), and TikTok (2017), coincided with a marked decrease in adolescent sleep and the time they spent with friends – two factors linked to the deterioration in young people’s mental health.
Don’t be fooled that kids just log onto social media and browse. They show and tell friends – and strangers – in vivid detail where they live, what they like and who they know, a smorgasbord of data for those wanting to manipulate their spending habits and behaviours. TikTok’s algorithms ingest a teenager’s every skip, share and comment and spit it all back to them with more and more content “personalised” to their likes and wants. The Chinese-owned app has spawned myriad global internet trends – viral dance challenges, hair slugging, so-called “cloud lips” makeup – and a dizzying kaleidoscope of memes and maxims, all designed to successfully keep eyes glued to screens. It’s called engagement.
Mrs Christine Harding, Principal