BY SAM CHANDLER

Last week, Australia became the first country in the world to ban under-16s from using most of the major social media platforms – a landmark moment in global tech regulation. Under the new law, all “age-restricted social media platforms” will be under a legal obligation to prevent underage users from creating or maintaining accounts through tools like age verification checks, AI age estimation software, or photographic or government-issued ID for new users.

Companies found in breach of the law could be fined up to A$49.5 million (£24.7 million); a serious sanction even for firms with annual turnovers in the billions. Canberra’s new hard line against Big Tech is therefore no half-measure; and is a welcome step towards protecting young people from technologies that are patently designed to silo and addict us.

However, without a significant cultural shift to accompany the ban, Australia’s experiment in tech-paternalism will amount to little more than applying a flimsy plaster over a gaping wound. This matters: as already political leaders around the world are treating Australia as a test case for similar future policies in their own countries.

In the UK for example, culture secretary Lisa Nandy has tentatively welcomed the ban, and even suggested Britain could follow suit “if it worked” and if young people trust it. Denmark’s prime minister Mette Frederiksen was more effusive: saying that social media is “stealing our children’s childhood”, whilst Norwegian PM Jonas Gahr Støre claimed children must be protected from the “power of the algorithms”. (Both Norway and Denmark have introduced similar, less radical versions of the policy in recent years).

Sadly, these fears are not unfounded. In his 2024 book The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt laid out extensive evidence linking heavy social media and smartphone use among teenagers to declining attention spans, weaker social ties, higher rates of anxiety and depression, and poorer long-term outcomes for both boys and girls.

The problem, according to Haidt, has as much to do with opportunity cost of excessive technology use as it does with the actual content being consumed. The calculation is simple: the more time young people spend online, the less time they will spend having formative experiences out in the real world. Whilst previous generations spent much of their childhoods outdoors engaging in loose, unsupervised play, today’s teenagers are far more likely to spend most of their time (at school and at home) with their eyes glued to various screens.

This rise of what Haidt calls the “phone-based childhood” is a pattern which has repeated across the developed world. Understanding this shift is vital for appreciating the seriousness of the issue that Canberra is trying to solve, but also (crucially) where the current plan falls short.

The fact is: now that smartphones and social media have become the default arena for teenage social life, simply removing access to devices is not enough. Nor will it help for policymakers to get pulled into a game of regulatory whack-a-mole with whatever shiny new website or app young people migrate to next.

Instead, what is needed is a broader cultural shift away from the phone-based childhood, and towards one which emphasises meaningful offline activities for children and teens. This will mean investing in much of the social and cultural infrastructure that previous generations took for granted – including youth centres, after-school clubs, volunteering opportunities, arts programmes and sports clubs.

These kinds of programmes may sound quaint to modern ears, but for many young people they can be a thin blue line against spending yet another evening endlessly doomscrolling on TikTok.

However, whilst organised programmes are important, they are also no substitute for the traditional forms of unsupervised outdoor activity. The reality is the phone-based childhood did not emerge in a vacuum. It filled a void that was left after youth clubs declined, traditional forms of community life fell apart, and parents became increasingly anxious about letting their children venture out alone and unsupervised.

The helicopter parenting so fretted about in the 1990s and the 2000s never went away; it simply became so universal that many people today would simply call it “parenting”. The result is that children have fewer opportunities to test boundaries, resolve conflicts on their own, or experience the small risks that are essential for developing confidence and resilience.

Against this backdrop, it is telling that free-range parenting – a movement aiming to restore independence and autonomy to late childhood and adolescence – is now regarded as a fringe or even reckless idea. Yet for most of human history, allowing young people the freedom to explore the world and learn their own life lessons was the accepted norm.

Rebuilding such a culture of real-world freedom and independence for young people will not be easy. Yet if we don’t, many children and teens will stay locked away in the confines of the home, with only screens to turn to fulfil their basic need for connection and adventure.

Australia’s ban represents a serious attempt to grapple with a genuine crisis, and for that it deserves credit. Unfortunately, the problem of the phone-based childhood cannot be solved by top-down regulation alone. Rather than cutting more and more heads off the digital hydra, our focus should be on rebuilding many of the social institutions that were once taken for granted. We also need to get much more comfortable with the idea of freedom and independence in late childhood and adolescence.

Removing access to social media and smartphones in schools may be a step in the right direction, but without this broader cultural project these measures risk simply swapping one form of deprivation for another. We owe it to the next generation to get this balance right.

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Sam Chandler is a Senior Consultant in the PR/public affairs industry and freelance commentator on politics, culture, and global affairs.