Entertainment
Penelope Cruz bans kids from having social media until they’re 16 to ‘protect mental health’
Penelope Cruz has laid down the rules in her house – her kids aren’t allowed to have social media until they’re 16.
The actress – who shares kids Leo, 10, and Luna, eight, with husband Javier Bardem – thinks keeping the youngsters off sites such as Instagram and Twitter for as long as possible will help to ‘protect’ their mental health.
Sticking to her guns, the 47-year-old (who has her own Instagram with nearly 6million followers, but doesn’t share mages of her kids) said Leo and Luna won’t be allowed phones of their own until they are ‘much older’.
She said during an appearance on CBS Sunday Morning: ‘I’m very tough with technology, for example, with my kids… It’s like, yeah, we’re going to watch movies sometimes or some cartoons. How can I not let them watch movies?
‘That has been, like, some incredible moments of happiness since I was a little girl. But not phones until they are much older and no social media until at least 16. I really see that that is, like, protecting mental health, but I seem to be part of a minority. I don’t know.’
The Madres Paralelas actress shared her worry about the impact social media use has had on modern teenagers and believes childhood now is very different to when she was growing up.
Penelope and Javier share two children (Picture: Laurent KOFFEL/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)
Penelope said: ‘I have a strange relationship with social media where I use very little of it in a very careful way.
‘There is something that is not making sense, and it is especially affecting younger generations.
‘I feel really bad for the ones that are teenagers now. It’s almost like if the world was doing some kind of experiment on them. “Oh, let’s see what happens if you expose a 12-year-old to that much technology.”
More: US TV news
‘The lack of protection that it is for a 12 year old to be involved in social media, any form of social media, there’s no protection for them, for their brains that are still developing, and how that affects the way they see themselves, everything, like, related to bullying. So many things that are not the childhood that we had.’
MORE : Piers Morgan’s living room photo leaves us with some questions
