In November last year, the Australian government passed a law banning under-16s from using social media. It’s the first attempt globally to restrict children’s social media use. Speaking on ABC Insiders, Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, explained:“The Parliament has overwhelmingly passed this legislation, and it is the right thing to do. I want children to have a childhood. I want them to engage with each other.”
Many social media platforms have age restrictions at 13 but some have argued that these restrictions aren’t properly enforced. Australia’s adoption of 16 as the age limit is the highest in any country. It remains to be seen whether some of the practical hurdles can be surmounted, and the law can be successfully implemented, but it is still a key development in the ongoing battle around the regulation of social media to protect children. What is particularly interesting about the Australia law is that it entirely bypasses parental preferences on the matter, making it the case that no parent can legally authorise social media usage by their child.
Here, we argue that children’s social media use is in opposition to the value of a carefree childhood and that this explains why regulation, such as these, can be justified.
From Harms to Bans
This legal development in Australia follows a recent and major publication by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. In The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, social media plays a key role in that rewiring. Haidt specifically calls for “no social media until the age of 16”. He says, “let children get through the most vulnerable period of brain development before connecting them to a firehose of social comparison and algorithmically chosen influencers.”
it is not enough to point to something having seemingly bad consequences, even for children, to establish that we should ban access to it.
Haidt identifies four foundational harms linked to social media in childhood. These are ways that current levels of social media use are disrupting normal development of children in deleterious ways:
Social Deprivation. Children are spending much less time with their friends than they were before the invention of smart phone, because they are spending so much time on their smart phones instead. The opportunity cost is doing real things in the real world that they were evolved for and are developmentally important, such as face-to-face social interaction.
Sleep Deprivation. Haidt uses longitudinal studies to show that smartphones came first and sleep deprivation followed. Children are getting much less sleep than they used to, which is incredibly important as children, especially teens, need more sleep than adults and sleep is developmentally crucial.
Attention fragmentation. Haidt calls smartphones “kryptonite for attention” and claims they harm executive function, partly due to the constant notifications from social media apps. Without prolonged periods of concentration, education and learning, not only in terms of academics, is incredibly difficult.
Addiction. Haidt claims that developers of the most successful social media apps used advanced behaviourist techniques to “hook” children into becoming heavy users of their products.
However, it is not enough to point to something having seemingly bad consequences, even for children, to establish that we should ban access to it. First, it is not always appropriate to legislate against bad things, and not only because legal means may not be an effective way of achieving the end. We know that high sun exposure in childhood has bad consequences in adulthood, and yet no one is advocating an outdoor ban for children during the hours where UV levels are high. Second, it is sometimes rightly left for parents to decide what their children do in certain domains, even if it is damaging. For example, we do not require children to go to the best local school against the preferences of parents and we allow parents to opt out of some forms of education.
To justify a ban, we must, first, show that the harms of social media use in under-16s are significant enough to warrant legal regulation. These harms must rise to the level of other harms that we legislate against, for instance, physical harm, damage to property, and human rights violations. Second, we must show that overriding parental authority rather than leaving it to their discretion is justified.
So, why is it not only bad for children to have access to social media and smart phones, but bad enough to warrant legal protections? One answer is that to make social media and smartphones available to those younger than 16 is a violation of their human rights.
On the face of it, the harms of social media do not seem akin to children’s basic rights as enshrined in legislation. When we think of children’s human rights, we think about their right to shelter and nutrition, their right to freedom from certain sorts of harms like torture, abuse, and neglect. We may also add a right to basic education and healthcare. But a right to not have their attention fragmented and a right to high levels of face-to-face interaction with their peers, do not seem likely candidates for human rights. This leads us to ask some deeper questions about what makes a good childhood and what currently unrecognised rights children may have.
The Importance of Being Carefree
One of us has recently argued that central to a good childhood is the notion of an entitlement to be “carefree”. To be carefree is to have “a mental life whereby an agent experiences the world without worry and responsibility to a significant extent even though there will be some moments where she experiences an array of negative emotions associated with stress and anxiety” (Ferracioli 2023, p. 107).
For children to lead good lives qua children, they must be carefree.
While adults do not need to be carefree to enjoy a good life, children do need to be carefree. This is because living a good life requires us to identify and pursue valuable projects that we endorse. Adults possess more developed evaluative abilities, such as self-reflection, moral reasoning, an understanding of time, and the capacity to weigh risks and opportunities, which allow them to pursue meaningful projects even when such projects are stressful. But we cannot say the same for children: “a childhood full of stress and anxiety is necessarily impoverished even if it is full of other valuable properties. A child that receives a great level of education, has parents who love her, and is given ample opportunity to play still fails to lead a good childhood if her mental life is so constituted that she is never or rarely able to not feel concerned, worried or stressed” (Ferracioli 2023, p. 111).
This is not to deny that social media can be stressful for adults too. But an adult at least has the capacity to take a step back and decide that the stress associated with social media is worth enduring in order to achieve a political, social, or professional goal they care deeply about.
Crucial to this argument is the idea that children’s endorsement of projects requires them to be carefree. This is because children’s sense of what is valuable is largely shaped and guided by emotional responses such as excitement, awe, and delight. The worry here is that children will fail to endorse play, loving relationships, and education, when they are constantly finding themselves worried or stressed. So, although it is true that many children in stressful circumstances still have access to valuable goods, we should not be naïve in thinking that they by themselves constitute a good childhood. For children to lead good lives qua children, they must be carefree.
If we look back to the studies Haidt uses in his argument, we can see plenty of evidence that a phone-based childhood is one that is not carefree and is likely to leave to seriously high levels of stress and anxiety. Haidt cites US national surveys of drug use and health which found that depression amongst teens is up from 2010 by 145% in girls and 161% in boys, and that anxiety among 18–25-year-olds increased from 2010 by 139%. Notably the incidence of anxiety increased dramatically from 2015 to 2020, for those reporting would have been 13-20 when smartphones became available. He also cites a startling statistic from a study of American college students that “only one-third of college students said they feel anxiety less than half the time or never.”
By creating such high levels of stress and anxiety, social media makes it virtually impossible for children to develop positive emotions towards the valuable things in their lives.
There are other studies that relate specifically to the age group covered by the ban. Emergency room visits for self-harm among 10–14-year-olds increased 188% for girls and 48% for boys from 2010 to 2020. Suicide rates for 10-14 increased 91% for boys and 167% for girls from 2010 to 2020. Haidt reports similar findings across the English-speaking world, including Australia, Canada and the UK. Particularly striking is the UK Teen self-harm episodes which are up 78% for girls and 134% for boys since 2010. In Australia, mental health hospitalisations for 12–24-year-olds are up 81% for girls and 51% for boys since 2010.
These stresses of social media are highly likely to be an obstacle to the kind of positive affect and endorsement that is necessary for a good childhood. By creating such high levels of stress and anxiety, social media makes it virtually impossible for children to develop positive emotions towards the valuable things in their lives.
This is not to deny that social media can be stressful for adults too. But an adult at least has the capacity to take a step back and decide that the stress associated with social media is worth enduring in order to achieve a political, social, or professional goal they care deeply about. Children under 16, on the other hand, are not able to adequately engage in self-reflection, identify all the values at stake, and weigh the different considerations in order to authoritatively choose a childhood of stress and anxiety for the sake of some socially approved goal. When they “choose” such a childhood, they are more like a toddler who chooses to watch a horror movie before bed every night than an adult who chooses to become a fire fighter or police officer despite the stress involved.
Parental Discretion and Complicity
Because carefreeness is central to child’s well-being, it is not something that can be left to parental discretion. As with other more basic well-being rights of children, such as the right to shelter, education, healthcare, the child’s right to be carefree, and therefore to be deprived of social media, is not one that falls within the authority of the parent.
In this new landscape, however, it may be right to say that parents who illegally facilitate their child’s access to social media are doing something akin to, or perhaps worse than, providing them with tobacco products or alcohol.
This is not to say that parents who currently allow their under 16 years old children to use social media are grievously wronging their children. Often, of course, parents do not know about their child’s social media accounts, and so parents cannot be said to have true discretion even now. But even where parents do have some control, depriving your child of social media accounts when almost every other child their age has one, runs the risk of imposing other social costs on your child. It may even be asking too much of a parent to restrict their child from using social media in the current technological landscape, despite the very serious harms Haidt sets out.
So, the passing of a law helps to resolve this collective action problem. In this new landscape, however, it may be right to say that parents who illegally facilitate their child’s access to social media are doing something akin to, or perhaps worse than, providing them with tobacco products or alcohol.
To summarise: a child is entitled to a carefree upbringing because without carefreeness they are unable to identify and endorse worthwhile project that contribute to their well-being; carefreeness, then, is not just something that it is nice to have, it is a kind of pre-condition for childhood happiness; the kinds of poor mental health we have seen coincide with increased use of smart phones since 2012 are clear obstacles to carefreeness and therefore childhood happiness; it is therefore a matter of great seriousness, and one we cannot leave to parental discretion, to regulate social media use for children under 16.
Liam Shields is Senior Lecturer in Political Theory at the University of Manchester. The unifying theme of Shields’ research is to address neglected fundamental questions that lie at the heart of real-world problems, and to carefully consider their practical implications. His work falls into three main areas: theories of equality and distributive justice, educational fairness, and child-rearing rights. He is currently working on a book length treatment of childrearing relationships that will address the topics of adoption, grandparents' rights, and stepfamilies.
Luara Ferracioli is Associate Professor in Political Philosophy in the School of Humanities at the University of Sydney. She was awarded her PhD from the Australian National University in 2013, and has held appointments at the University of Oxford, Princeton University, and the University of Amsterdam. She works on the philosophy of immigration and the philosophy of the family. Her first book Liberal Self-Determination in World of Migration was published in 2022 with Oxford University Press. Her latest book Parenting and the Goods of Childhood was published in 2023 with Oxford University Press.
Disclaimer: Any views or opinions expressed on The Public Ethics Blog are solely those of the post author(s) and not The Stockholm Centre for the Ethics of War and Peace, Stockholm University, the Wallenberg Foundation, or the staff of those organisations.
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