Today, the UK government announced plans to ban social media for under-16s. Prime Minister Keir Starmer said the restrictions are needed to protect children’s wellbeing and mental health. Slightly to my own surprise, I think they are right.
This is awkward for me.
I am a huge free speech advocate.
If something is legal, broadly speaking, I am for people being allowed to say it. Even if it offends someone. Hurt feelings are unfortunate, but usually preferable to governments deciding what people are allowed to think, say or see.
Which is partly why I find myself in a strange position.
I am deeply suspicious of governments regulating access to things, especially this government, whose instincts often seem to begin with ideology and end with bureaucracy.
And yet.
I am also a father of three daughters.
An ex-school governor.
And someone who has spent enough time around children, schools, parents and WhatsApp groups to believe we have collectively done something absolutely astonishingly stupid.
We ran a giant social experiment on an entire generation of children.
And it turned out terribly.
The experiment went something like this:
“What would happen if we gave children unlimited access to addictive, algorithmically optimised dopamine machines, placed directly in their pockets, with almost no rules, very little supervision, and companies financially rewarded for keeping them glued to screens?”
The answer, it turns out, is:
Not brilliant.
A friend told me yesterday that in his son’s maths exam, around half the class had special dispensation linked to mental health issues.
Half.
Now, obviously, not all of that is social media. Life is complicated. Mental health is complicated. Correlation is not causation, as people on the internet enjoy shouting in all caps.
But also:
Come on.
We can all see what is happening.
I see it in my own children.
I see it in their friends.
Anxiety.
Constant comparison.
Fear of missing out on things they did not even want to go to in the first place.
A generation somehow simultaneously overconnected and lonely.
Children sitting together while staring into entirely different worlds.
A low-level hum of unhappiness.
And some truly dreadful behaviour.
If aliens landed and watched modern parenting for ten minutes, they would conclude that humans worship rectangles.
Observe a restaurant.
There will be a family sitting together, physically present but spiritually outsourced to separate devices.
Parents scrolling.
Teenagers scrolling.
Sometimes toddlers watching videos with the volume set to “airport runway.”
Nobody speaking.
Nobody noticing.
We have replaced conversation with thumb movement.
I was in the Maldives in January.
The Maldives.
One of the most beautiful places on Earth.
Turquoise sea. White sand. Palm trees doing palm-tree things.
And there were couples doomscrolling.
Doomscrolling in paradise.
Imagine explaining this to your ancestors.
“Yes, we travelled across the world to sit in extraordinary beauty and watch strangers argue about politics.”
Many people say:
“Well, it’s the parents’ responsibility.”
And in theory, yes.
In practice, parenting does not happen in isolation.
If 29 out of 30 children in a class have smartphones with unrestricted access to social media, your child becomes socially exiled without one.
You are not making a parenting decision.
You are negotiating with a culture.
We made the decision not to give our first two daughters smartphones until they were sixteen.
They hated it.
At the time, we were terrible people.
Practically medieval.
I suspect there were moments when they considered contacting social services.
But now?
They thank us.
Then came daughter number three.
And, in one of parenting’s classic moves, where experience somehow makes you worse instead of better, we relented earlier.
It did not go especially well.
Which is a polite British way of saying:
I think we got that wrong.
At this point, I am honestly in favour of banning social media for under sixteens.
Probably smartphones too.
Possibly tablets.
Definitely tablets in restaurants.
Maybe the whole lot.
Bring back boredom.
Boredom is underrated.
Boredom is where imagination lives.
Boredom built treehouses, bands, terrible teenage poetry and mildly dangerous bicycle jumps.
Now boredom lasts approximately eleven seconds before someone reaches for a glowing rectangle.
I suspect history will look back at this period with genuine confusion.
Like:
“Wait. You knew it was damaging mental health, sleep, attention and social development, and your response was… to give younger children even more access?”
And we will say:
“Well, yes. But everyone else was doing it.”
Because that is often how regrettable things happen.
Not through evil.
Through drift.
Through convenience.
Through tired parents wanting five quiet minutes.
I understand why we got here.
Modern parenting is hard.
Phones are easy.
But if the evidence continues piling up the way it is, I think we may eventually look back on this whole period as one of the great parenting mistakes of our time.
A moment where adults outsourced childhood to algorithms and acted surprised when things went sideways.
It feels, increasingly, like a shameful episode.
And I say that not from a place of superiority.
I say it as someone who has probably made plenty of mistakes too.
Just one who increasingly suspects we should have hidden the Wi-Fi password and sent everyone outside.
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