The vicious side part, intense Harry Potter obsession, neon pink braces and peace signs held up in every photo taken are all markers of what I like to call, “my tweenage years.” It is this abundant amount of awkwardness that consumes life during middle school; it is a rite of passage for all 12-year-olds as they embark on their later teenage years. However, as our world catapults into an escalating digital age, with social media becoming all-encompassing, the “Tween Era” is being squandered.
To me, this raises an alarm as our society begins to transition away from embracing tweens to ignoring the pure existence of this community. I feel like, as we begin to encourage the direct jump from childhood straight to the teenage years, or even more concerning, to adulthood, we concurrently extinguish the ability to be naive.
We all remember that ever-so-awkward gap between our childhood and adolescence. The time when we transitioned into young adulthood, a time of mistakes and mishaps, but that’s the point. As we are growing into ourselves and undertake this new path to discovering our individuality, there is a dire need for a stage in life with the ability to mess up, reorient our ambitions and just be unsure about where we want to go.
In an age of technology, specifically social media, this era is going extinct. If there isn’t an ability to be unsure of who you want to be and everything is documented on the internet, there is a simultaneous loss of this preadolescent innocence.
I look back on my “tweenage years” as the acceptance from broader society for me to embrace my gawky self. I would drag my mom into stores like Justice, an emporium meant solely for preteenage girls that was filled with color and pizazz. Their clothes were sparkly, adorned with peace signs and sweet messages like “made to be you!” in big bubble letters across t-shirts. Sure, Justice may have been cringy, but that was its purpose. The store encapsulated the pure concept of being a “tween.”
In today’s world, Justice has had all stand-alone stores closed since 2020, a big part of the doors closing due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the rippling economic effects. I challenge this further, arguing that Justice’s closing signifies much more than just a company that struggled with bankruptcy in a post-pandemic society. As a whole, I feel that society mostly closed the gap between childhood and adolescence as we moved online during this period.
In my eyes, the pandemic was a scapegoat for parents to give the “okay” for kids, young adults and teens alike to immerse themselves in a social media-dense society. I can understand the need for some sort of creative and humorous outlet during the shutdown and parents giving up on social media rules and handing their kids access to TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat. I can’t imagine the difficulty in parenting a 12-year-old during this time and can comprehend the need for digital distraction.
However, we never moved away from these digital distractions and instead transitioned into embracing them with full force. When you have a young girl on the internet consuming media from the most popular influencers, it may seem like a harmless act. But, at a critical developmental age, we must raise concern for the very real and harmful effects that this will have on mental health. It may be cliché, but I argue that nothing is truer than ‘comparison is the thief of joy.’
It is not a new argument that social media has significant impacts on mental health, especially on a vulnerable age of the younger teen (or tween) years, but I further this point to include the complete erasure of this developmental gap. Not only does social media harm the impressions of what is realistic, especially in terms of body image for tweens, but a bigger problem lies beneath the surface: the elimination of any capacity for error or awkwardness.
I think back to 6th grade when I wore a shirt every other school day that said “Hairy Pawter” on it, with a cat in a Gryffindor scarf and the Sorting Hat perched on its head. I was an avid fan of the Disney Channel with shows like “Liv and Maddie,” “Jessie” and “K.C. Undercover.” I felt that I had a solid group of role models across these TV shows, but most importantly social media was absent from my life. Although the Disney Channel may not have been the most realistic, the content was much less harmful to my developing brain than consuming videos from Miami and Los Angeles-based influencers as a middle schooler.
As we propel into this new digital age, I urge for app developers to encourage parental controls and for parents to actually take advantage of their controls. To prevent this era of “tween” from disappearing, we must be cognizant of the importance of this period and embrace this age. Tween culture is critical to this ability to be naive and unknowing about the world. If our society gives no room for this growth and instead pressures immediate adolescence, we lose sight of what it means to find our own individuality.
