Kate Winslet Explains Why Her Children Don't Have Social Media And How Dangerous The Internet Can Be For Young People

Celebrities' children are often famous by default, but there are more and more actors who are coming forward to speak about the importance of the privacy of minors. Couples like Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds have always kept their children private, as have Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher. Internationally adored actress Kate Winslet has also come forward to explain how she's preserving her children's privacy and innocence by keeping them off social media.

Kate Winslet Explains Why Her Children Don't Have Social Media and How Dangerous the Internet Can Be for Young People

In an interview with the BBC, Kate Winslet says she agrees with the Children’s Commissioner for England Dame Rachel de Souza about not giving children smartphones. She opened up about her own parenting choices and offered some advice to moms and dads who are struggling to figure out what to do with social media.

"I don't have some magic formula. I don't want to be accused of being a celebrity standing up on a soap box, but it is possible to just say, 'No,'" Kate says. "My children don't have social media and haven't had social media."

Kate doesn't have any social media accounts and neither do her children, and yet there are many imposters who create fake accounts pretending to be her or her children. Regardless of how unpopular her decision may be, she has stood by it and refuses to let her kids have access to platforms like TikTok and Instagram.

"You can't have it because I want you to enjoy your life," Kate continues. "I want you to be a child, I want you to look at the clouds and not photograph them and post them on your Instagram page and then decide whether the clouds were worth looking at because something thought that they were rubbish."

"It's tampering with sometimes a very basic level of self-esteem, but on a bigger and darker scale, it is tampering with young people's self-esteem to the extent that they are completely losing a sense of who they are, and don't know how to communicate with not just their friends, but their families, and it's making them depressed. It's clearly making them depressed. It's obviously a huge problem."

It's refreshing to hear a celebrity talk frankly about the use of social media and its impact on teens everywhere. There are higher rates of teen suicide and mental illness than ever before, and there's no denying that the rampant use of social media is related to these statistics. It's disturbing to see how easily children have access to predatory and sexually explicit content on platforms like TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, etc.

"Don't let your children have a phone if they are too young to know what to do with it," Kate advised.