The three essential steps to business success
Most businesses aren’t failing to scale from lack of effort, but from lack of structure and strategy. Here’s why getting the foundations right is what actually drives growth.
If you work in marketing, it’s easy to believe you can’t raise kids today without social media. It’s where culture happens, where trends are born, where brands and influencers live. As a parent and a marketing professional, that used to feel like a given to me too.
Now Australia’s new under‑16 social media ban is landing, and a lot of young people — and their parents — are panicking.
I’m not.
I see it as an opportunity. Not to turn back the clock, but to open up a different way of thinking: one where our kids’ sense of belonging doesn’t depend on an app.
When our twins were born in 2011, my husband and I were both in senior marketing roles — me in global retail, him in a top creative agency. We were also far from home, with no relatives in Australia, no built‑in babysitters, and very little back‑up. If anyone had an excuse to park kids in front of screens, it was us (no judgement — some days survival mode is real).
We chose something else, something that suited us. The twins started preschool at 20 months and took the bus with their dad, picking a fresh flower every morning on the way for their favourite teacher Daphne. We didn’t hand over our phones at cafes.
iPads came with Kindergarten, not before. We’ve always eaten dinner together at the table, no TV or devices.
They got their first smartphones the Christmas before high school. Today, as mid‑teens, they still don’t have social media accounts.
If you’re picturing sheltered, awkward kids with no social life, let me reassure you.
At preschool everyone knew them — teachers, kids, parents. They’ve always had a solid mix of boy and girl friends. They play sport, hang out at the beach and the movies, and still see their primary‑school mates.
At home, the conversation ranges from schoolwork to sex, politics and whatever’s happening in the world. They eat without their phones, watch TV without a second screen and talk to friends without scrolling at the same time — because they see us doing the same.
Studies on teens and media show that this kind of modelling and routine is one of the simplest ways to reduce harms from social media and improve sleep, stress and overall wellbeing.
I’m not telling you this to say ‘do what we did’. I’m sharing it because it shows another path is possible: kids can be socially connected, digitally literate and happy without building their lives around a feed.
Professionally, it’s my job to understand social media: how the algorithms work, what keeps people clicking, what sells, what doesn’t. Personally, it’s my job to raise two humans who can navigate both the real world and the digital one without losing themselves in either. Those two responsibilities don’t always line up neatly.
While our boys were young, I also served on the board of eChildhood, a health promotion charity working to reduce pornography harms for children and young people. That work brought me face‑to‑face with research on just how quickly kids can be exposed to violent and degrading content online, and how much that can warp their ideas about bodies, consent and relationships.
At the same time, I was watching ‘behind the curtain’ of social platforms as they refined their attention‑hacking tools.
Once you’ve seen the business model up close, it’s hard to un‑see it. Social media isn’t neutral; it’s optimised to keep all of us — especially young, developing brains — engaged for as long as possible.
Public‑health and youth‑mental‑health experts now warn explicitly about how algorithmic feeds can funnel kids toward extreme, harmful content and make logging off feel like their whole social world will vanish.As a marketer, that’s fascinating. As a parent, it’s a red flag.
That’s why, in our house, the rule was never ‘social media is evil’. The rule was ‘let’s understand how this works before we hand over the keys’. We watched documentaries about social platforms and online porn with the boys when they were old enough, and then talked honestly about what they’d seen.
Once they understood the incentives and the risks, they were surprisingly relaxed about not having accounts.
So what does the under‑16 social media ban change? On paper, it sets 16 as the minimum age for accounts on major social platforms and puts the responsibility on companies to kick under‑age users off, rather than pretending not to see them.
In practice, kids can still see plenty of content without logging in, and some will find workarounds via false ages or parent accounts.
For many teenagers, losing their accounts feels devastating. Social media has become their main way to stay in touch, express themselves and feel seen.
But the same research that highlights those benefits also highlights some real costs: higher risks of depression and anxiety, disrupted sleep, body‑image issues, self‑harm content, and relentless social comparison — especially with heavy, late‑night and emotionally loaded use.
Seen through that lens, the ban isn’t a punishment; it’s a forced pause. It’s a chance to ask: where else can our kids’ need to belong be met? If the loss of an app feels like the loss of all connection, that’s not just ‘kids these days’.
It’s feedback on the bigger ecosystem around them — family, school, community — and on how thoroughly platforms have stepped into the role of companion, entertainer, therapist and mirror.
At Write Way Up, the work is about helping leaders align their businesses so they can ‘drive profit on purpose’ — making money by doing something that actually helps people. Most of those leaders use social media as a key channel. So what does all this mean for them?
First, it means accepting that ‘not targeting kids’ is no longer enough. Even when brands aim at adults, under‑16s watch the same adult influencers, beauty hauls and lifestyle content.
Evidence links heavy exposure to idealised bodies and lives with increased body dissatisfaction, anxiety and FOMO in young audiences, especially girls. Pretending that ‘it’s not for them’ while knowing they’re watching is a choice — and not a very defensible one.
Second, it’s an invitation to design better. Regulators and experts are starting to talk seriously about ‘healthier defaults’ — safer baselines for feeds, content and data use, especially for minors. Imagine if:
It wouldn’t be perfect. Kids would still find edge cases. But it would be a very different starting point from ‘anything goes until someone complains’.
For leaders, this is where ‘profit on purpose’ gets real. The under‑16 ban shrinks one audience, but it opens up another: adults who are increasingly awake to harms and hungry for brands that act like grown‑ups in the way they use platforms and influencers. Those are your customers, your employees and, very often, your kids.
If there’s a single lesson from our family’s journey, it’s this: keep your eyes open. Don’t shut down, don’t outsource, don’t give up. Educate yourself and stay educated. Parenting has never been simple, but raising kids in a world of infinite feeds and infinite influencers is a particularly wild ride.
For me, the purpose of parenting has always been to be part of the whole journey — not just the highlights reel. To embrace the everyday moments through the lens of a child. To stay curious. That has meant learning how social media works, understanding why it feels so compelling, noticing where it helps and where it hurts, and then making deliberate choices, again and again.
The under‑16 social media ban doesn’t remove that responsibility. It just gives us a little more room to exercise it. As parents and as marketers, we can treat this moment as a loss of a favourite channel, or as a rare chance to redesign how our kids – and our businesses — show up in the digital world.
The platforms will keep evolving. The influencers will keep posting. Our best move is to stay awake, stay involved and show the next generation — in how we live, not just what we say — that they never needed followers to be worthy of belonging in the first place.
At Write Way Up, we help leaders of small and medium-sized businesses align purpose with sustainable performance.
If you want your business to thrive, let’s connect.
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