Gongol.com Archives: July 2025

July 22, 2025

Who should control screen time?

Admirably, the British government tacitly acknowledges the importance of science and technology enough to have a designated Secretary of State for Science, Innovation, and Technology -- as of now, a man named Peter Kyle. Kyle has held the job for a year, and is in the process of "looking very carefully" at the time children spend on social-media apps, promising, "I'll be making an announcement on these things in the near future". ■ By "these things", he is reported to be considering interventions like a 10:00 pm Internet curfew and a two-hour daily limit on app use for children. It is widely believed that over-use of social media is contributing to problems like sleep disruption and anxiety, and there are heartbreaking examples of gravely harmful content reaching vulnerable young people at awful times. And the rise of AI-driven chatbots presents a whole new horizon for trouble. ■ But people of goodwill ought to be reluctant -- perhaps extremely so -- to see governments act as the caretakers of children's technology use in such a nanny-state fashion as imposing curfews and mandatory time limits. New technologies almost always spark new moral panics, and moral panics tend to beget backlash. Who is more likely to uncover and share all of the loopholes around government controls: Parents or children? ■ Moreover, overwrought promises of government protection have an unpleasant way of breeding contempt for the law. At the same time, the more government promises to provide "protection" (in circumstances where it ultimately cannot deliver), the more ordinary people adopt a sense of learned helplessness and end up both disappointed and disempowered. ■ Parents and families need technological tools to help define boundaries for their children, many of which are already available but scarcely adopted. Parents need ongoing education, not only in how to manage technology at the family level, but in how to cultivate an environment to help young people take part in the real-world human engagement that everyone fears is being squeezed out by addictive tools like social media. ■ Rather than raising the stakes of a cat-and-mouse game around time spent on social media, lots of parents probably just need more and better advice about truly listening to their kids, creating attractive alternatives to mindless screen time, and opening up opportunities for the kind of face-to-face interaction with friends about which many adults reminisce fondly from their own youthful days before the Internet. ■ Childhood and adolescence have always called for thoughtful and intentional intervention by caring adults. A prudent society does much more to focus its energies on the adults closest to the developing young people, rather than trusting the interventions of government officials in faraway bureaucracies.