Penelope Cruz won't let her children have social media accounts until they are 16.
Penelope Cruz thinks social media is damaging to young people
The 47-year-old actress - who has 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 and they won't be allowed phones of their own until they are "much older".
She said: “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 worries about the impact social media use has had on modern teenagers and believes childhood now is very different to when she was growing up.
Speaking on 'CBS Sunday Morning', she 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.’
“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."
Tagged in Javier Bardem Penelope Cruz