Why shouldn’t teenagers be allowed to use WhatsApp?

For my thirteenth birthday, which coincided roughly with my Bat Mitzvah (the Jewish ceremony for entering adulthood), I had begged for – and got – my own phone line. This was so that I could talk for hours on the phone to friends I had seen all day, or possibly all weekend if they were at a different school, without tying up the whole family’s phone system. Friends would call and whoever picked up would holler to me that ‘Lexie/Sarah/Jessica/Anna is on line two’ and put the friend through. There would be a click and off we went, at liberty to gab privately for hours. I don’t actually remember spending much time on homework.

Is there much difference between that central role of pointless communication – albeit conducted by voice – and the contemporary child’s endless back and forth over instant messaging? Whether there is or not is debatable, but either way the hysteria over Meta’s lowering of the age for WhatsApp from a bizarrely high 16 to 13 (still pretty high) is mystifying.