Australia has broken Big Tech’s spell on childhood. The UK should too.

[.style-intro]A decade ago, no parent would have imagined a world where a ten-year-old might see a beheading video before breakfast, or spend more time scrolling than with friends. And yet, here we are.[.style-intro]

Somehow, we’ve normalised the abnormal. We’ve slid into a status quo so obviously damaging that it should feel unthinkable. Australia’s decision to raise the minimum age for social media to 16 is the first serious recognition that this experiment has gone too far.

By acting, they’ve acknowledged the reality of growing up in today’s world. Not the world Big Tech prefers to present – empowering, connected, creative – but the world parents, teachers and young people are actually living in every day.

In less than a decade, childhood has been quietly colonised by platforms built for adults. Time with friends, time outdoors, time to just be – all squeezed out by systems engineered to keep children online for as many minutes of the day as possible.

The race-to-the-bottom logic of the attention economy means children are being exposed not just to violent extremism, pornography and algorithmically amplified self-harm content, but to hyper-real beauty filters, misogynistic influencers, eating-disorder rabbit holes, compulsive comparison, gambling-style mechanics, and an endless stream of toxicity no parent would knowingly invite into their home.

Ten years ago, these would have been unimaginable intrusions into a child’s life. Today, this is just reality for every child with a smartphone. 

This is not normal, or inevitable. And yet for years we’ve been sold the comforting fiction that with enough parental effort – enough supervision, enough ‘digital literacy’ – children could simply cope.

They can’t. And neither can we.

Most adults struggle to look away from their phones long enough to finish a film, hold a conversation, or fall asleep. If we can’t resist these systems, why do we imagine children should?

For many children today, the most vivid memories they’ll carry into adulthood will be of other people’s lives – influencers, classmates, strangers online. Social media has made observing childhood easier than experiencing it.

Despite how Big Tech and its PR machine would prefer to frame it, this is not a generational clash. Young people are just as concerned as their parents, often more so. Many in Gen Z regret how early they were allowed onto platforms, and 80% say they plan to keep their own future children off them for longer. The first generation raised inside the machine is warning us not to repeat the experiment.

Parents feel the same. In little more than 18 months, more than 350,000 of them have joined the Smartphone Free Childhood movement – not because they’re anti-technology, but because they’re terrified by, or exhausted from, fighting a trillion-dollar ecosystem on their own.

We hear the same thing from parents in our communities every day: if every child in your Year 7 class has TikTok, you’re not battling your child; you’re battling impossibly powerful network effects. This is a collective action problem, which hundreds of thousands of parents are already working together to solve through our Parent Pact. Good policy backs up the parents who are already taking action – and helps create collective rules that make it easier for every family to do the same.

What’s striking about the Australian policy is how united the public are: seventy-three per cent support raising the age. Many are unsure how it will be implemented, and yes, some young people will find workarounds. They always do. But that has never been a reason to abandon protections for children. The question isn’t whether the policy will be perfect, but whether it will be better than the status quo. And the answer is clearly yes.

Of course there are trade-offs. Some young people rely on online communities, and we have to acknowledge that honestly. Any good policy must protect these young people, not isolate them. That means pairing age limits with safer, age-appropriate digital spaces so connection doesn’t depend on entering platforms designed for adults. Nuance should inform action, not block it.

What we cannot do is keep outsourcing the solution to companies whose business incentives run in the opposite direction. If we keep pretending these companies will fix a problem they make astronomical profits from, things will only get worse.

None of this is radical, it’s basic common sense.

In every other industry, we apply the precautionary principle: prove your product is safe before you sell it to children. We apply it to medicine, food, films, toys, even toasters. Social media is the only major child-facing technology without any basic safety checks. That’s the anomaly here – not the idea of raising the age to 16.

As a society we already set age limits on driving, sex, alcohol, gambling, sunbeds, fireworks, energy drinks and many more adult activities – not because these things are bad, but because children need time before they’re ready for them. If social media platforms weren’t owned by companies with such unprecedented economic and political power, we’d surely have applied similar restrictions years ago.

When two-thirds of young adults say social media has done them more harm than good, maybe we should listen. When teachers say the problem is out of control, maybe we should listen. When hundreds of thousands of parents start organising in towns and cities across the country, maybe we should listen.

Australia has shown that the status quo isn’t inevitable. If the tech giants won’t change, the UK should – not because Australia has solved it all, but because the price of inaction is too high. Childhood is too important to leave in the hands of companies whose business model depends on it being scrolled away.