Have you heard the recent stories about nine-year-old girls who have become obsessed with skincare routines? These days, instead of wanting to get a gift certificate to Claire’s for their birthday, they prefer Sephora. How about the 10-year-olds obsessed with watching adult shows on Netflix instead of age-appropriate content on Disney+? It’s all evidence of a disturbing trend: young girls seem to be growing up faster and skipping the awkward tween phase altogether.
Ashley Embers, a parenting YouTuber with over 127,000 subscribers, explored this topic in a compelling video that gives five reasons why young girls are skipping the valuable tween phase and acting like teenagers. This troubling trend is caused by changes in media, marketing, smartphone use, and how young girls socialize.
Why are tweens acting more like teenagers?
“This small sliver of time between childhood and teenage life was once a transitional phase where children would start to find their place in the world, but now they bypass their awkward stage altogether and jump straight into behaving like adults,” Embers opens her video.
Here are Ashley Embers’ five reasons why childhood is being cut short for many tween girls.
– YouTube
1. Tweens are abandoned by retail
“One of the reasons that preteens have fizzled out is because they don’t have designated stores for them anymore,” Embers says. Growing up, when departing from childhood, you would get stores designed explicitly for that transition into teenhood. Think Pink by Victoria’s Secret, Claire’s, Justice, and Ardene. These stores got you out of the childish styles of clothing and accessories while still keeping everything age-appropriate.”
2. Social media has a bigger influence on tween fashion
“A big reason for the lack of preteen stores is because children’s fashion influence is now coming from TikTok and Instagram rather than their peers at school,” Embers says. “The problem is that most of the creators on these platforms are over the age of 13, unless you go through the loophole of having a parent-run account, and this means that the kids who are going on these platforms are being influenced primarily by adults and teenagers.”
Tween girls volunteering.via Canva/Photos
3. The demise of pre-teen media
In the video, Embers says that two types of media are just not as relevant for preteens anymore: television shows, specifically Disney programming, and magazines such as Tiger Beat or J-14.
“The cream of the crop was the Disney Channel. The shows from Disney were iconic and such a big part of so many people’s upbringing, think of Lizzie McGuire, Ned’s Declassified, Hannah Montana, Wizards of Waverly Place, Sweet Life of Zach and Cody, That’s So Raven,” Embers says. “The thing that made these shows so special is that they taught us about the transition from childhood to adulthood. They addressed things like crushes, navigating cliques in school, conflict with friends and parents, and just finding out who you are, and what you want to be.”
Embers says that kids watched these shows after school and could talk about them with their friends the next day or watch them together. But nowadays, people watch television at their own pace, and that communal spirit is gone.
4. Advertising has changed
There has been a significant shift in how tweens interact with advertising in the era of social media. The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act was passed in 1998, which prohibits social media platforms or online services directed at children under 13. Embers says that even though kids 13 and under shouldn’t be using many of these online platforms, they still do and are exposed to advertising for adult products, because it’s illegal to sell them anything else. This has affected tween tastes by making them advanced for their age. “We got ads for things like toys and games, and kids now are getting ads for Stanley Cups and wrinkle-free straws,” Embers says.
5. Overexposure to crisis
Once a tween is given a smartphone or their friends have them, they are exposed to many of the world’s horrors. This causes them to lose the innocence of childhood and become worried about politics, natural disasters, inequality, and violent crime at a time when their brains aren’t developed enough to process them.
“There is increased exposure to violent or sexual content at a younger age which causes a desensitization and normalization because children’s brains aren’t fully developed to process this in a way that an adult brain can,” Dr. Willough Jenkins, an inpatient director of psychiatry at Rady Children’s Hospital, San Diego, said, according to Embers.
Embers’ reasoning for the end of the tween era may be distressing to many. Still, she concludes the video with a silver lining: schools and parents are beginning to crack down on smartphone use among tweens and teens, and we may be on the precipice of positive change. “The effects we’re seeing of social media on kids are still so new that there’s still time to rewrite the story for these kids,” she says. “With all the research coming out about the damages of phones on children, things are starting to change.”