There was once a very specific kind of childhood embarrassment. You were 11 or 12. You had questionable fashion choices, an aggressively colourful school bag, probably a collection of friendship bracelets and an obsession with whichever Disney Channel or Nickelodeon show everyone at school was talking about. You loved flipping the pages of Seventeen or Teen Vogue whenever you got the chance to see a copy. You were too old for toys but not quite old enough to understand why older teenagers suddenly seemed so cool. You were a tween.
The tween years were an awkward little bridge between childhood and adolescence—a period when you were beginning to discover who you were without yet feeling pressured to have the answer. For many Millennials and older Gen Zs, that stage came with its own unmistakable culture: Hannah Montana, iCarly, Wizards of Waverly Place, silly internet usernames, brightly coloured accessories, school crushes and the strange confidence that came from believing you had completely figured out life at 12.
But something feels different now. Today, an 11-year-old may know the latest TikTok trends, follow beauty influencers, understand luxury brands and have strong opinions about skincare. Instead of asking for a new toy or a fancy journal, they might be asking for a Stanley tumbler. Instead of experimenting with glitter and lip gloss for fun, they may be following elaborate beauty routines designed for adults.
The question isn’t whether children are growing up. They always have, always will be. The question is whether childhood is being compressed.
There Used to Be a Middle
The word “tween” itself suggests an in-between state: not quite a child, not quite a teenager. And that ambiguity was the point. There was a period when children were allowed to occupy that middle ground without immediately being pushed towards the next stage. You could be interested in boys without dating them. You could wear lip gloss without having a ten-step skincare routine. You could care about your appearance without treating yourself as a brand. In Nigeria, this looked slightly different from the Western tween experience, but the basic idea was familiar.
It was watching Hannah Montana after school, rushing home to catch The Suite Life of Zack & Cody, trading stickers or stationery with friends, spending hours on games, reading Jacqueline Wilson, Goosebumps or Dork Diaries, and arguing with siblings over the television remote. It was the era of Facebook becoming interesting, BBM statuses becoming a form of communication and, later, Instagram becoming the place where teenagers began documenting their lives. There was still a boundary between what children consumed and what adults consumed. That boundary is increasingly difficult to find.
From Cartoon Network to the Internet Algorithm
For Millennials and older members of Gen Z, children’s television did something algorithms no longer necessarily do: it created a shared cultural experience. You watched the same shows as your friends. Characters were roughly your age. Their problems were recognisable. The drama was usually about friendship, school, parents, fitting in and having a crush on someone who probably didn’t know you existed. Then came the algorithm. YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and other platforms do not necessarily care whether a piece of content is appropriate for an 11-year-old. Their primary function is to keep users watching. And the algorithm has no real understanding of the developmental difference between a child watching a beauty tutorial and an adult watching one. A child can therefore move from a cartoon to a beauty influencer, from a gaming video to a celebrity’s luxury house tour, and from a harmless dance trend to content designed for an entirely adult audience, all within minutes.
The result is a strange cultural situation in which children are increasingly exposed to adult lifestyles before they have experienced childhood fully. Instead of looking exclusively towards characters their own age, they are looking towards influencers in their twenties. And influencers are not simply showing them how to live. They are showing them what to buy.
When Childhood Becomes a Personal Brand
Perhaps the biggest difference between growing up now and growing up before social media is that today’s children are not merely growing up. They are growing up IN PUBLIC.
The tween years used to be full of experimentation. You could have a terrible haircut, wear an embarrassing outfit or develop an inexplicable obsession with something that lasted three months. Then you moved on. There was no permanent digital record. Today, an embarrassing outfit can become a TikTok. A birthday party can become content. A child’s room can become part of a carefully curated Instagram aesthetic. Even ordinary childhood activities can become opportunities for documentation.
The pressure is therefore no longer simply to have a childhood. It is to have an aesthetic childhood. The right clothes. The right room. The right phone. The right birthday. The right friends. Suddenly, even childhood has a branding problem.
When Wanting Becomes Something You’re Taught
There is another important difference: consumption. Children have always wanted things. That isn’t new. What has changed is the speed and sophistication with which children are marketed to. A child can see a product on TikTok, watch an influencer review it, see someone else unbox it, search for another video about it and then ask a parent to buy it—all before dinner. The distance between wanting and buying has collapsed. Gone are the days kids would have to wait till christmas or when a relative is coming back from abroad to get a coveted product.
In Nigeria, where parents are already navigating the realities of rising living costs, school fees and household expenses, the pressure can be particularly complicated. A child may compare herself not only with classmates but with children she has never met, living in countries she has never visited. She sees the birthday haul in Lagos, then vacation vlog from Dubai, and the bedroom makeover in Barbados. The internet has effectively removed geography from childhood comparison. Your classmate is no longer the only person you can feel behind.The entire internet is.
Where Did the Awkwardness Go?
There is something surprisingly valuable about being bad at things. The tween years were supposed to be awkward.You tried on identities. You changed your interests every few months. You said embarrassing things. You discovered that the person you thought was your best friend had a different best friend. You experimented with clothes that made absolutely no sense. And then you survived it. That awkwardness was not a failure of childhood. It was practice for adulthood.
Today, however, children are increasingly encouraged to perfect themselves rather than experiment with themselves. Filters remove imperfections. Beauty products promise improvement. Algorithms reward polished presentation. Influencers present carefully edited versions of their lives. The child is therefore learning not simply who am I? but increasingly, how do I look to everyone else? That is a very different question, and a dangerous one to center during one’s formative years.
But Is It Really “Brain Rot”?
It is tempting to blame everything on brain rot and declare that children today have simply lost the plot, but that would be too easy.
Every generation has complained that the next generation is ruining childhood. Millennials were told that too much television would destroy their attention spans. Older generations complained about video games. Before that, it was comic books, radio and whatever else young people happened to enjoy. The problem is not that children watch silly videos. Children have always enjoyed silly things. The bigger concern is the absence of boundaries around what they encounter. A child can enjoy nonsense and still have a rich childhood. The issue is, what happens when nonsense, advertising, adult content and social comparison become the dominant environment in which childhood takes place?
The Problem With Adultifying Childhood Emotions
There is another paradox here. We are more comfortable talking about children’s emotional wellbeing than previous generations were. That is a good thing. But there is a difference between taking children’s feelings seriously and expecting children to understand themselves with the emotional vocabulary of adults. Not every difficult day is a crisis. Not every friendship disagreement requires a psychological diagnosis. Not every period of sadness needs to become a public declaration for an online audience to know that your child can eloquently express their feelings.
Children need support, certainly. But they also need room to experience ordinary disappointment, embarrassment, boredom and conflict without feeling that every uncomfortable emotion must immediately be fixed. Growing up involves learning how to sit with difficult feelings and gradually develop the tools to handle them. That process takes time. And children should be allowed to take it.
Governments Have Started Drawing the Line
The concern about children and social media is no longer limited to parents, educators and psychologists. Governments are beginning to draw their own lines around how young is too young for social media. Australia, for instance, introduced a world-first social media minimum age in December 2025, requiring major platforms including Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube and Snapchat to take reasonable steps to prevent children under 16 from holding accounts. Other countries are considering similar measures, reflecting a growing international debate over whether children should be expected to navigate platforms designed around engagement, advertising and endless scrolling in the first place.
The 90s Nigerian Child Still Has Something to Teach Us
Interestingly, Nigeria may still have some of the cultural ingredients that can protect this missing middle. There is still the neighbourhood. The cousin who comes over during the holidays. The aunt who sends you outside because “you’ve been inside too long.” The compound where children invent games with whatever they can find. The school friend who becomes your entire world for three months. The Christmas trip to the village.The endless family gatherings where adults are talking in one room and children have created their own universe somewhere else.
These experiences are not necessarily glamorous but that is precisely why they matter. They aren’t designed for Instagram. They aren’t monetised neither are they optimised for engagement. They are simply childhood. Of course, not every Nigerian child has access to these experiences, and Nigeria is changing rapidly. Urbanisation, safety concerns, technology and changing family structures mean that children have fewer opportunities for unsupervised play than previous generations did. But that makes intentional protection of childhood even more important.
What We Owe the Next Generation of Children
Perhaps the answer isn’t to recreate 2008. We cannot and probably shouldn’t. Children today live in a fundamentally different technological world. They will develop different interests, use different platforms and experience adolescence in ways previous generations could not have imagined.
But we can preserve the principle behind the tween years: Children deserve a period of life that does not require them to perform adulthood. They should be able to play badly, dress strangely, be uncool, have hobbies that aren’t monetised and exist exist without constantly documenting themselves. And perhaps most importantly, they should be allowed to grow into themselves gradually.
