HEALTH Secretary Jeremy Hunt has gone on the offensive with social networks and given them a lecture about making the digital world safer for children. It’s like watching Victor Meldrew tell Stormzy that loud music is bad for his ears.

In fairness to Hunt, he’s making a decent point. Unregulated social media really isn’t a safe place for kids and in years to come I hope we’ll look back with incredulity at how careless society was in this era when it came to what our kids were getting up to online.

I was in my teens when I first started using the internet and trouble was never far away. There was an endless stream of men waiting around every digital corner, eager to speak to young, naïve girls. In those days their favourite haunts were the old MSN chatrooms - anyone and everyone could join them, although at least in those days we still kept ourselves anonymous online. Today’s kids will never remember the time when the idea of putting your real name onto anything on the internet was considered horrendously stupid.

Having gained a notorious reputation, the chat room format was soon ditched and the social network emerged to create a digital world even more dangerous for young people.

Now, kids put everything about themselves online. Narcissistic selfie culture may have seemed alien once up a time to us non-digital natives, but it’s normal to today’s kids. On top of that, advancements in GPS technology mean they don’t only put their names and faces all over the place, it’s also fairly easy to track them down to whichever street they’re in. Furthermore, a lot of their parents have no idea what they’re up to - they’ve migrated to social networks like Snapchat while their parents are still on Facebook. It’s the cyber equivalent of letting your 12-year-old hang around the city centre pubs and clubs at closing time on a Saturday night, right next to the paedophile rehabilitation centre. God knows who they’re meeting.

Even if parents become a bit more savvy and effective in limiting the risk posed to their kids online, being immersed in that culture of narcissism and competitiveness is having a detrimental effect on wellbeing and mental health. It gets difficult to see where the positives in any of it are.

As a result, Hunt wants to crack down on social networks and force them to introduce tools that reduce cyber bullying, prevent kids circumventing age barriers and encourage more limited screen time.

"I fear that you are collectively turning a blind eye to a whole generation of children being exposed to the harmful emotional side effects of social media prematurely,” he wrote in a letter addressed to big tech firms including Google and Facebook.

So Hunt is making a decent point, but there’s a problem. People like him and people like me inhabit a different world entirely to today’s kids. It’s not just because they’re young and we’re, well, not so young, it’s because we’re fundamentally separated by a digital line.

I’m convinced that our brains are now wired differently. It’s not uncommon to see children as young as two or three glued to smartphone or tablet screens. Indeed, it never ceases to amaze me how kids that age can happily smash and wreck everything in sight if they’re in the mood, but if you stick a cartoon on a smartphone they’ll handle it with a delicacy only rivalled by an adult with a winning lottery ticket.

Their brains are little computers, and they’re making instant, lifelong connections to our new technologies. This is their 'normal' while, to me, it still often feels like a novelty. They understand it differently.

It’s not too much of a surprise, then, that politicians and law makers in their 40s and beyond are struggling to make much of an impact on the multitude of problems created by big tech companies. It’s not unheard of for sheriffs or judges to need the concept of social media explained to them during cases. It’s becoming laughable.

And it’s for this reason that I’ve given up, to an extent. I’m just not sure that the older generations are the ones equipped to fix this problem. I suspect that it’s the digital natives, the kids who can use an iPad better than I can, who will be the change the world needs.

Fair play to you, Jeremy, but we’re just old farts now. If you really want to make a difference, it’s time to start pulling the talents of our youth into the policy and decision-making processes wherever you can. They’re the experts now, and the most we can probably do is offer them the best guidance, support and wisdom we can.