Ask parents around the world what their child does when they get home from school and chances are you’ll get one answer: drop their bag, sit on the sofa and pick up their phone.
Screen time for children is increasing – a recent Ofcom report suggested the average British child aged 8–14 now spends nearly three hours a day online on phones, tablets or laptops, not counting games consoles.
Keeping in touch with friends outside the classroom often involves devoting hours to chatting on social media. It’s a habit that some have called an addiction – The Anxious Generation, a 2024 book by American social psychologist Prof Jonathan Haidt, helped galvanise a movement to suggest something should be done to protect kids from spending so much time on social media.
Whether the book’s findings stand up to scrutiny is hotly debated among experts, but the idea has caught the attention of the general public and politicians.
Which is why in December 2025 Australia enacted a ban on under-16s accessing social media. The decision has been appealed by some social media firms, including Reddit, which lodged a court case against the Australian government.
Australia’s Social Media Minimum Age (SMMA) law “is not the best way to approach this important issue,” a Reddit spokesperson said in a statement. “That’s why we’re bringing this case.”
The ban preventing Australia’s around five million under-16s accessing social media is likely to be circumvented by wily children with tech knowledge.
But it’s an astounding, population-level experiment that researchers are looking at to try and answer a key question for our times: is social media really as harmful as we fear?
Understanding the problem
Social media is a relatively new thing. The first major mainstream social network, MySpace, was founded in 2003. Facebook, which unlike MySpace is still used by many, arrived a year later – though younger users only joined several years after its creation.
That means there’s precious little data to examine what impact using these platforms at an early age has on our sense of self and wellbeing. And in the 20-plus years since Facebook’s arrival, a range of other social platforms have cropped up that critics say are even more addictive.
Many researchers looking at child safety suggest that there may be something to fears that social media is negatively affecting children. But it’s too early to tell definitively – partly because of the relative lack of time we’ve had it, but also because the ubiquity social media has achieved makes it difficult to discern any impact it might have had.
“It’s quite hard to draw conclusions from the existing evidence base about the uniform impacts of social media on mental health,” says Prof Amanda Third, co-director of the Young and Resilient Research Centre at Western Sydney University.
She points out that some young people who could be described as most vulnerable to ill mental health are “also some of those who derive the biggest, most significant benefits from social media”.
Overall, “youth mental health is a very complex issue,” she says. “It very rarely has single drivers.”
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A mental health crisis?
Despite that, many are keen to pinpoint social media as driving the mental health crisis in young people. National surveys suggest around 14 per cent of Australian children and adolescents aged 4–17 meet criteria for a mental disorder at any given time.
It’s not just an Australian problem: a 2025 Global Burden of Disease analysis finds that people born after 2000 show a higher prevalence of depression than earlier cohorts, especially in high-income regions.
The suggestion among many worried parents is that social media is to blame – overlooking other potential factors.
For instance, those born after 2000 have lived through 9/11, the global financial crisis and, for those in the UK, austerity, the COVID-19 pandemic and the AI revolution displacing jobs, all at key points in their lives. But whatever the reality, Australia’s leap into the unknown is an opportunity to establish a ground truth.
“The evidence doesn’t really support the ban,” says Prof Daniel Angus, director of the Queensland University of Technology’s Digital Media Research Centre.
But while he may not agree with the scientific basis for it, Angus is excited about the opportunity the ban provides to properly examine what impact social media – and its absence – has on children.
“We’ll obviously be studying it and studying children’s experiences (and the experiences of their wider families and social circles) to really understand the impact that it has on them,” he says.
Weighing up the impact
Those impacts could be positive and negative, as Third explains. “There’s an eye not only to tracking the anticipated outcomes, but also to try to work out what some of the unintended consequences might be,” she says.
Identifying those unintended consequences will be a key part of her own research on the impact of the ban, which she’s undertaking with colleagues at Stanford University in the US.
Third worries that the negative impacts of removing what has, until now, been a constituent part of childhood social lives could equal or outweigh any positive impacts, if they exist.
“There are really significant consequences on young people’s access to information, their right to freedom of expression, their right to assembly,” she says.
She acknowledges the worry parents have and the excitement the ban has stoked in them. “Some parents have been very excited to see this legislation come into being, thinking that it will remove some of the burden of parenting in the digital age from them,” she says.
But she’s not sure that will necessarily be the case, given they’ll now have to contend with other issues – including kids trying to circumvent the ban and using social media away from prying eyes, rather than out in the open.
Uncovering nuance
The researchers hope that they’ll be able to inject some scientific rigour into the argument about social media’s impact on children, which to date has been a black-or-white matter.
“There’s been no room for nuance or subtlety in the debate or in any of the kind of development of the policy itself,” says Angus. “They’ve wanted a very simple policy solution, which is the ban.”
What that outcome will be is less certain. “I’m not sure we’re going to see a massive impact on young people’s mental health and certainly not in the short term,” Third says.
It’s a view that suggests the ban may be based on worry, rather than a reality that social media is solely to blame for dwindling mental health among younger generations.
But whatever the answer, one thing that Australian researchers hope to establish is a more nuanced view of what’s happening in kids’ minds and lives when they use social media – and when it’s taken away from them.
Angus and his team will be continuing the work they’ve already been doing pre-ban to learn more about how children think about their digital social lives.
“We want to get underneath that, into more of those kinds of thicker, richer, experiential accounts of what this really means for their media diets and their participation within society more broadly,” he says.
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