Gemma Tognini: If we want to improve the health of young girls and young women, cut down on social media

I remember with terrifying clarity, high school phys-ed lessons. Twice a week, every week, that seasonally-adjusted, forced few hours of exercise which brought varying degrees of discomfort for me. Unlike my parents and my brother, I was no athlete. I grew up thinking fourth was a place. In the cooler months, it was cross-country running, a pastime I was not biologically crafted for. On a good day, I would strategically engineer a “tight chest” and pop myself under a tree with a book while my classmates endured the dreaded 12-minute run. On a bad day, my teacher didn’t buy it and I joined everyone else in a test so cruel in design, it pitted kids of spectacular athletic ability against those of us designed for more sedate pastimes. In summer, the blessing of having a school with its own swimming pool was countered by the mild to medium trauma of wearing bathers in front of my co-ed classmates. Thankfully our bathers were uniform and regulation. Small mercies, I guess. This week, I read with interest that around the world, young girls aged between 10 and 19 are at risk of significant damage to their health for the simple fact that they’re not exercising. More than 85 per cent of them don’t exercise for the recommended minimum of 60 minutes a day. The older they get, the more sedentary they are. And in Australia, it’s worse. Just shy of nine out of ten young girls are to put it mildly, sitting around on their behinds. On the surface of it, the stated reasons make some kind of sense, and they resonate with me, still, 30-odd years after I left high school. Trust me folks, I wrote the book on teenage girl awkward. I didn’t love wearing my bathers at school. Late teen me was somewhat festively plump, year-round. I didn’t have anything even remotely resembling a swagger. I was (and remain) spatially unaware and a bit of a klutz. I remember the sniggers and the looks. Teenagers can be cruel. It’s just a fact. I can poke fun now with the benefit of adulthood and distance, but it was tough. And this of course was in the day and age before social media. Before Instagram and Snapchat and umpteen different ways in which kids can make fun of each other. I can’t even imagine what it must be like. But is that where all the blame lies, or is it in other places? I wonder. It’s not just social media as the platform, it’s social media as the deliverer and I would argue, the passive enabler of an insidious erosion of the confidence of young women. Even as an adult, it’s sometimes difficult not to compare yourself to others. Take Jennifer Lopez for example. She’s 52. The woman is BUFF! As someone who is closely nudging the half tonne, every time I see a picture of her, I toy with a self-improvement project I’m loosely calling operation J-Lo or nifty by 50. Will let you know how it pans out but suspect I’ll have to give up eating Twisties. As with junk food, with social media, it’s not the packaging (the platform) that’s to blame, it’s what’s inside. It’s not the wrapper around the KitKat that does the damage, it’s the chocolaty goodness inside. It’s not social media itself, it’s what we choose to consume via this channel. I can vouch for the fact that if you want to restrict your social media diet to the hilarious antics of giant pandas, Irish dancing videos (Michael Flatley is still a thing, apparently) and endless reels of horses getting themselves into mischief, it is doable. It’s not great for productivity but my point is, you get to choose. We are what we eat. We are what we consume. What we watch. What we read. All of it. Perhaps if we want to improve the health of young girls and younger women especially, it’s time to cut down on social media. Some of you may say it’s too hard to separate your teenager from their smartphone. It isn’t. It just takes grit. As an example, friends of mine banned their teenagers from having social media until they graduated high school. How? I asked them at the time. We just said no, they replied. What a concept, eh? Parents drawing a line in the sand based on what’s best for their kids, backing each other up and holding the line. Miraculously, neither kid in question suffered. Both excelled and continue to excel at school and in their chosen sports. They have a healthy social network and importantly, don’t spend their days stuck behind screens. These mates of mine are not alone either. Another friend and her husband simply refused to let their young boys have screens until they reached a certain age, and then only for things that were educational. Her kids grew up playing outside. Using that long forgotten thing called an imagination. Is this the easy option? Of course not, but when was the easy option ever the best one? The thing that always gets me is we as a society know how rubbish social media content is for our young people but we for the most part continue to throw our hands in the air, as if we’re powerless to say no. We’re not. And it’s not too late to start. Gemma Tognini is executive director of GT Communications