Gosh, isn’t it terrible how addicted all these children are, I think as I scroll through yet another video of a devastated teenager being interviewed about the impending social media ban for under-16s. Their total reliance on their phones really is very concerning, I muse, swiping away a notification about my four hours of daily screen time.
The commenters are on my side, of course. “This is exactly why it was banned,” writes one grown adult on a video that another grown adult has filmed and posted online of their 11-year-old child sobbing over the ban. “Oh actually I suddenly changed my mind, this is very clearly needed,” chimes in a third grown adult.
In total, 65,000 grown adults have liked those two comments. Almost 100,000 have liked the video. But they are all very well-adjusted. None of them is in a parasocial relationship with the device that lives in their pocket, which follows them into bed, into the bathroom, the queue at the pharmacy, and is always there on the sofa, the bus, the pub table – waiting to fill any moment of boredom, of silence, of thinking. Yes, it’s true that these adults are watching this video on TikTok, but it’s different because they could delete the app anytime. They don’t want to right now, but they could. Just one more hit. Maybe next week.
The children’s reactions are confronting and uncomfortable because we see ourselves in them. We hope we are less full of angst and better able to regulate our emotions, but their responses hold a mirror up to us all. In another TikTok video I watch – the app’s largest and most active demographic in the UK is my generation, 25- to 34-year-olds – Liberal Democrat MP Jess Brown-Fuller films her six-year-old’s upset over the ban. “It’s just hard,” says the child, whose face you don’t need to be able to see to know that they are crying. Watching YouTube is how I relax, they say.
I don’t think any parent should post their child’s distress online – and the children in these videos are clearly distressed – but I understand the intention behind doing so. ‘Look what we’ve done,’ these videos shout. ‘Look what we have to stop.’ Yet the fact is that many adults are asking children to give up the very thing they themselves are dependent on, having spent years removing almost every alternative.
Last year, the Atlantic commissioned and published a study of more than 500 eight- to 12-year-olds in the US, finding that more than 75% would prefer to hang out with their friends in-person, rather than virtually. “Being glued to their screens is their default but not their desire,” the authors concluded. The children wanted to be out playing, but they weren’t allowed; more than a quarter said they couldn’t even play in their front garden without a parent present. “Kids will always have more spare hours than adults can supervise – a gap that devices now fill,” the authors wrote. “‘Go outside’ has been quietly replaced with ‘Go online.’”
At the same time, children have become more depressed than ever. Around 2012 – less than a decade after the launch of YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Facebook and many other social media platforms – rates of poor mental health began to rise in teenagers in both the UK and the US, having been stable throughout the early 2000s. Many experts have linked this phenomenon to young people spending more time on devices and less with friends.
This social media ban is a cop-out, a craven way for an embattled government to say it’s tackling a problem without actually doing the only thing that would meaningfully solve it: forcing Big Tech bosses to make their social media platforms less vile, violent, and addictive places to be. But if this is the route that ministers are taking, and it seems that they are, then they can’t just ban social media and expect young people’s lives to suddenly improve. If teens are to spend less time online, they need somewhere else to go.
Council spending on youth services in England has fallen by 76% since 2010/11, when David Cameron’s Conservative government took office and began ushering in austerity measures. As of 2023, about 1,200 publicly run youth centres had closed, research by UNISON found. Today, under Keir Starmer’s Labour government, the situation is getting worse still. The 2024/25 financial year saw the number of local authority-run youth centres fall from 429 to 379, and the largest annual drop in councils’ funding for youth services in a decade, according to a report published by the YMCA in February.
The report finds that these cuts are not being felt equally across the country. In the West Midlands, the region with the highest rate of child poverty in Britain, affecting more than a third of children, councils spent £25.74 on youth services for each child aged five to 17 in 2024/25. Inner London councils, meanwhile, spent an average of £100.88 per child.
And as youth centres have been shuttered, third spaces have been decimated. Almost 800 council-run libraries were reportedly closed between 2010 and 2019; a BBC investigation published last year found we’re still losing an average of 40 a year. Even parks aren’t safe places for teens anymore; the Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014 gave police officers the power to disperse any teenagers and youth groups whom they judge to be causing a nuisance from public spaces.
During the bank holiday weekend at the end of last month, officers in Nottinghamshire identified 34 young people as being anti-social in one local park, 23 of whom were ‘dispersed’ and returned to their parents with warning letters reminding them that their child is their responsibility.
They’re your problem, the authorities tell parents. Keep them at home. But for god’s sake, don’t let them on their phones.
Jade-Ruyu Yan
