There is an outbreak. It has no known cure, no life-saving medical team, nothing. It spreads algorithmically, through the blue light of screens in dark bedrooms. Children ages 8 to 13 are the primary victims, or maybe the primary source. It’s hard to tell anymore.

“The tween age,” as we knew it, is gone. The age range itself might still exist, but the media, culture, and outlets that once encapsulated it are essentially extinct.

A tween used to be so easy to spot. Awkward, glittery, obsessed with a pop star who would be irrelevant in eighteen months. Seen buying friendship necklaces in bulk at Justice. Seen playing Mario Odyssey or trading Pokémon cards.

That has changed, though. Each year, it seems like the childhood benchmark for those activities moves further and further backwards. Now, Pokémon trading is more closely reserved for younger people than middle school, and the buffer between child and teen is a mere void, trying to be filled.

Middle school is hard enough, and now, with the internet taking the next generation by storm, we are seeing clear, lasting societal effects that won’t be fully understood until later. Kids are changing; they aren’t really kids anymore. But why?

The easy answer – the one everyone points to – is social media. And yes, obviously that is an aspect to this change. TikTok, Instagram, YouTube Shorts: a never-ending scroll of older, glossier, more polished people living lives that look nothing like a seventh-grade bedroom in the suburbs. When the algorithm can’t distinguish between a 12-year-old and a 24-year-old beauty influencer, it won’t bother trying. Neither will the 12-year-old.

But blaming social media is only blaming the environment, like blaming the sky for the storm. Technically accurate. Not quite the whole story.

Because if you look closer, something stranger is happening. Something more structural. The entire cultural ecosystem that held tweenhood together, that gave it its own aesthetic, its own economy, has quietly been collapsing.

Consider the stores. Justice, a pinnacle of early 2010s neon girlhood, filed for bankruptcy in 2020. Claire’s, a staple for getting your first ear piercings and $6 earrings shaped like mustaches, has been in and out of financial ruin for years. Even the Disney Store, that most reliable of childhood landmarks, shut down hundreds of locations. To put it locally, all these stores used to be at Flatirons Crossing Mall (I went to them A LOT), and now all of them (and more) have closed. You could try to pin this to the decline of in-person shopping and malls, yet these stores have mostly shut down online, too. The physical spaces where tweens were supposed to spend their allowances and their Saturday afternoons are gone, as if they were never there in the first place.

Retail didn’t just lose these kids as customers. It lost an entire target market.

And into that space stepped Sephora–a luxury store that, until recently, most people associated with upper-class adults who own multiple skin-care serums. Now it’s overrun with seven-year-olds purchasing retinol for its decorative packaging and advertising from their favorite influencer. Seven. There are dermatologists posting genuinely alarmed videos about the skincare routines of children who are also, still, children. The tween didn’t grow up. She just skipped straight to 35 and started worrying about her pores.

Then there is the language. It’s not just young female-specific habitats affected by this. Young boys are turning to increasingly concerning methods of self-degradation. Every generation invents its own slang, but the vocabulary currently circulating among those under-13 is extreme.

Looksmaxxing: the practice of examining one’s physical appearance with the same joylessness as a performance review for a corporate job. Mogging: to “defeat” someone else in attractiveness, to simply out-exist them in a room. These are not words that emerge from a culture that thinks childhood should be carefree and fun. These are words that emerge from a culture that has decided children should be relentlessly and exhaustingly competitive about their faces.

These might seem like funny, stupid words right now, but we have no idea how damaging this is to the mental health of young men. Watching a guy on YouTube inject peptides and drugs into his face to “out-mog” someone isn’t healthy. That kind of nitpicking comparison is concerning.

Even mainstream teenage-focused television networks are fading. Both Teen-Nickelodeon and Disney Channel have seen massive drops in engagement, and where they once launched 3–5 new live-action shows annually, now cater mainly to animated series and younger audiences through apps instead of cable. Television shows like iCarly, Lab Rats, and Girl Meets World aren’t around anymore for middle schoolers to relate to, so they are left with yYoutubers who aren’t looking out for them the same way those shows were legally required to.

So what actually killed the tween? Social media lit the match for sure. But the kindling was already there, in the bankrupted stores, the fleeting television shows, and in the complete failure of the adult world to maintain any kind of separate, protected space for the experience of being young and figuring it out.

Kids aren’t just exposed to adult content. The entire “tween” age group was discontinued like a bad marketing plan, and then society seemed surprised when children stopped acting like children. Can we really blame the tweens? When the world around you tells you you aren’t profitable enough for your demographic to exist anymore, what are you left to do except grow up?