Viva Brighton Issue #58 December 2017

FAMILY
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Brighton5
Peer support for screen teens
Daisy Cresswell and
her sister Tayler are
the founders of social
media company Liberty842.
Now Daisy
(pictured left) tells us
how they’re cutting
back on big name
clients to focus on
helping teenagers and
parents understand
each other better.
We’ve worked in social media for years, managing
accounts for celebrities like Alan Carr and
creating online narratives for shows including Holby
City and The Archers. Our experience has been really
positive but I was increasingly concerned about
the way my teenage daughters used social media.
My youngest, who’s 13, seems to spend all
day behind her bedroom door on Snapchat and
Instagram. When she goes somewhere without
wifi, she’ll ask her older sister to keep up with her
Snapchat ‘streaks’ [where users are rewarded for
keeping conversations going as long as possible].
I never knew exactly what she was up to but I
was reading about how one in four girls aged 14
have depression fuelled by social media. I thought,
I can’t look back with good conscience and say I
didn’t do anything while this is the world I work in.
I spoke to my 16-year-old about it, she said
something interesting - how the hierarchy in our
house changed when I wasn’t there and instead of
squabbling, she almost became ‘mum’ and the two
of them talked to each other.
I came up with the idea of Brighton5, an
initiative made by teenagers for teenagers as a
peer support system. We have a group of girls
aged 16 to 18 who
discuss mental
health, body image,
pocket money,
responsibilities,
school and college.
They will go on a
mission to try and
sort this shit out and
have fun doing it. It’s
TV-based and we
hope to start filming
in the Easter holidays.
It turned out that most of the girls were as
worried about social media as their parents.
One said, ‘If we had a world without social media
I wouldn’t miss it’. That was astonishing. But it
goes back to the point that if you can’t talk to your
child, you’ll never know that’s how they really feel.
The second strand of the project is a parent
podcast – exploring their fears about teenage
behaviour. I went to look at the Mass Observation
archive at The Keep and even in the 80s and 90s
diarists were writing things like ‘teenagers are
trouble’. Yet they were teenagers once. I thought
it would be funny to look at the way we were as
teens and compare that to today. Are our kids
really any worse than we were?
Brighton5 is a really big deal for Tayler and
me. We’ve culled 70% of our client base and
I’ve been working on Brighton5 nonstop since
July. Yet I’ve never been so determined about our
mission – to make (good) trouble!
As told to Nione Meakin
Daisy and Tayler are keen to hear from parents
who would like to take part in the podcast. Visit
brighton5.com for details
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