Banning Kids from Social Media Won’t Keep Them Safe

I was born in the late ’90s and grew up with social media. By the time I was ten, my friends and I were exchanging “new” internet slang and emojis on MSN messenger; at thirteen, I was sharing filtered selfies on Instagram and Snapchat. And while I shouldn’t have gotten a Facebook account until I was thirteen, I opened one when I was ten by simply lying about my age.

Looking back, I wonder if I would’ve been better off without the constant connection—if I didn’t have to deal with the pressure to constantly update my Facebook status or the school bullies feeding the rumour mill after hours.

Younger generations might not have to. On June 10, the House of Commons introduced Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act, which, among other measures, would force social media platforms to restrict accounts for those under sixteen, unless the platforms can establish safeguards to protect kids from harm. But those exemptions and their safeguards haven’t been defined nor have the consequences been clearly laid out for kids who, like me, manage to skirt the age restrictions. Canadians generally support the proposed ban, according to some polls, but critics have pointed out the challenges of forcing tech platforms to comply, not to mention the near impossibility of getting kids to follow rules.

So would age restrictions make social media any safer for kids and young teens? For a nuanced perspective on the issue, I reached out to Danielle M. Law, a psychology professor at Wilfrid Laurier University, whose research focuses on how internet socialization affects cognitive and emotional development in young people. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

How effective do you think this ban could be?

At first glance, the ban sounds like a good idea. We need to protect our kids, there’s a lot of garbage online, and it’s creating a lot of unhealthy behaviours. It’s not good for the well-being of young people and adults.

In the early days of the internet, we had Net Nanny and all sorts of software to watch and manage what kids were doing, and those were largely ineffective. Kids knew more about the technology than their parents did, and so they were finding ways to get around Net Nanny and all those other kinds of software. They were going to friends’ houses or the library and just going online there. These parental tools broke trust between parents and children. Rather than having conversations about online safety, it really became more about monitoring.

Would a ban for under-sixteens just be Net Nanny all over again?

One of the primary reasons that kids go online, and also adults, is that their friends are online, and it’s one of the few places that they get to socialize unsupervised, which is developmentally appropriate in older childhood and adolescence. They’re seeking independence, and we want to foster that. It’s how they can grow and take risks to learn how to be a healthy adult who can make good decisions. If we are constantly supervising them or not giving them space to make mistakes and challenge themselves, they won’t learn how to do that into adulthood.

I think the social media ban will work best if everybody and all their friends are not on it, because then they likely won’t experience FOMO. If everyone is offline, then great, but then we have to give them an opportunity to experience unsupervised play in another environment.

Assuming you can’t kick everyone offline and eliminate FOMO, what options does that leave us with?

I don’t think we can just say “ban,” and leave it at that. I think we need education and modelling: adults modelling responsible use, adults teaching and learning about how to manage their own time around social media and teaching kids about responsibility and building good habits, as well as giving them space to practise good habits. If we keep taking things away, and if we keep putting shields around everything, there’s no opportunity to practise healthy skills. We want to prepare them for the day they turn sixteen so that when they engage with social media, they will have the skills and knowledge to do so responsibly.

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What does teaching kids responsible use look like?

What research has found repeatedly, and not just for online things, but in general, is that—at least here in North America—communication and parents building trusting relationships with their child, where kids feel comfortable going to their parents about a problem, are more important developmentally than just monitoring what they’re doing. Monitoring doesn’t teach them responsibility; it just teaches them that when they are not monitored, they can do what they want.

If, as a kid, you haven’t built a strong relationship with your parents, you won’t go to them when you’re in trouble, because you’re going to be afraid that they’re going to punish you. Immediately, your parents or the school just want to take the device away. Take the device away, the bullying goes away. But that’s not actually accurate. The bullying’s still happening. Just because you don’t see it on a screen doesn’t mean it’s not going on, and it doesn’t teach about responsible use, and it now creates an environment where kids are scared to go to an adult when they’re in trouble. And when they’re in trouble, that’s precisely when we want them to come to us.

Who should be leading these conversations?

It’s challenging because who wants to take on this responsibility? Often schools believe this is something that families need to take responsibility for, while parents are saying, no, this is something they ought to be taught at school. And honestly, I think it’s part of the whole village mentality. We both need to be on board, and kids need to be seeing responsible use modelled at school and at home, because this is lifestyle habit development.

Australia has already implemented a social media ban for kids, and Britain and other countries are jumping on the bandwagon. Are we in an age of kid bans?

It seems easy to just ban it, without figuring out how to keep people accountable for it and not really even looking at the research on the impacts of bans. We’ve seen countries where there are no age restrictions on alcohol, but instead there are conversations with kids about alcohol at younger ages, which makes it less likely to have kids who engage in binge drinking. We know that banning abortion actually leads to unsafe abortion practices. Banning sex before marriage increases the likelihood of unprotected sex. Banning social media could lead to . . . we aren’t sure yet.