SALT LAKE CITY — The TikTok trend “I Remember When I Was Crazy” is hilarious — and revealing about what it was like for young people growing up on social media.
Users have been sharing their most embarrassing attempts online to get the attention of their crushes using the lyric “I remember when I was crazy” from Gnarls Barkley’s 2006 song “Crazy.”
Most of the videos begin with the young people shaking their heads in despair, before showing “embarrassing” content they posted to Snapchat and Instagram as teenagers.
The captions range from, “My crush said he likes emo girls so I posted this” to, “My crush said he likes girls with nose piercings so I glued an earring in my nose and posted this.”
While most of the younger generation’s posts are harmless, if a little immature, the trend raises important questions about the social media posts that children and teens make and how, whether consciously or not, they create a lasting digital footprint.
“When you’re 15, you might not be thinking about what a future employer might think about what you post,” says Deborah Heitner, author of Growing Up in Public.
But frankly, she says, potential employers shouldn’t be too worried about questionable content posted by applicants when they were 15.
“No one should be allowed to not hire someone because of something they posted as a child,” Heitner said. “It’s developmentally inappropriate and it’s unfair.”
Kids will make mistakes while learning how to use social media, and parents need to help them have important conversations and model a healthy relationship with the digital world.
Parents should teach their kids what they can and can’t post online without threatening them that inappropriate posts will prevent them from getting into a good college. Not only is this probably untrue (most college admissions teams barely have time to even read applicants’ essays, much less find their Instagram accounts), but it also teaches kids that inappropriate posts primarily affect them, not others.
“If a 15-year-old is hurting someone with what they post, I think they should be held accountable at that point in their community,” Heitner said.
Some may want to take social media away from their kids entirely. Even Utah Governor Spencer Cox has backed a measure that would allow minors to have social media accounts only with explicit parental permission.
But Heitner says the solution to digital immaturity isn’t to shut kids off from technology altogether, which could stifle their free speech and hinder their future online interactions.
Plus, for the majority of kids, social media isn’t a catastrophe or an immediate disruption to their mental health, Heitner said.
So how do you deal with this? Like most parenting questions, the answer is “it depends.”
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to social media: some teens are able to handle it early on, while others need to wait a little longer. Some kids can manage their screen time with little difficulty, while others can’t.
“There’s no perfect age,” Heitner says. “Thirteen isn’t the perfect age because they’re already figuring out who they are and comparing themselves to others, but it’s also a really fun time to be interacting with friends and exploring their identity.”
However, Heitner has some best practices and insights: If you have a child who is just getting started on social media, have them stick to one platform at first, and then add in others as you see fit.
Encourage your child to follow a small number of people, mostly people they know, and if they do follow others, like celebrities or influencers, make sure they follow people who inspire them.
“Pay attention to how following makes you feel,” Heitner says. If the answer is “not great,” have the maturity to unfollow.
In Heitner’s experience, most teens are less concerned with follower numbers or building their own online brands; they care more about whether people they care about are responding to their posts.
Another important factor is comparing the time children spend on screens with the time they spend doing other things. Activities like sports, youth groups and reading can help screens blend into the background.
At the end of the day, your kids will post things that are a little embarrassing to their future selves, and that’s okay — who knows? Maybe they’ll laugh about it later on TikTok.
