Youth media protection: Cell phones and social media for under-16s? Why not wait until they're 18?

10/18/2025

Digital battles are raging, including for children's minds. Social media companies have stepped up their game – but are children even prepared and adequately protected?

My wife and I have four children. As early adopters of digital technology, media studies graduates, media professionals, and creative types, we are open to early media education and encourage responsible learning and practice with digital media, including with our own children. Of course, they want to act and make decisions independently as quickly as possible, and that includes using and applying digital and especially social media. But is that always appropriate and correct?

What speaks in favor of early use of digital media by children

Children learn early on to use media independently and responsibly. They acquire skills easily and playfully that will help them later on with other challenges: first discover, then try, later learn, and finally master.
We see this clearly in the way they use AI: many young people, such as our older children, use it easily and naturally, employing it efficiently for analysis and research. At the same time, they question it critically. In plain language: they don't believe every piece of nonsense that ChatGPT serves up to them. In any case, they don't want to scroll through Google, the medium of their ancestors, for long; they have neither the time nor the inclination to do so.

Sounds like a romantic idea? That's how it worked in the past with all other introductions of new media: when TV replaced radio, private television replaced public broadcasters, and before that. Young people adapt earlier, better, and faster than older people, while the latter complain loudly, the former use it with enthusiasm, joy, and profit—so basically nothing new.

Children's use of digital media: What are the arguments against it?

The new digital school – we are following the experiment live at our younger children's schools.

All children have tablets: “Hurray!” we thought. Finally, no more heavy backpacks weighing down their backs on the way to school in the morning. Unfortunately, however, they still have to carry heavy books, because the school and teachers don't want to do without them.
Tablets do make some things easier in the classroom: instead of paper worksheets, digital documents are created, distributed, filed, discussed, and corrected. But messages to parents are still created in analog form and distributed via mail folders and lesson plans.

So the idea of digital teaching and learning is okay in principle. It gives you an idea of what digital teaching could look like – but nothing more. In other countries, we have seen this taken much further, e.g., in international school teaching.

Worse still, the tablets are not nearly secure enough! Children can create their own IDs on the devices and use them to download and install whatever they want. This is against the rules, but kids aren't stupid: if it works, they'll do it.
The right way to do it: When we, as a digital agency, set up tablets and computers for museums, trade fairs, and events, we do EVERYTHING we can to protect them against any unwanted interference: We block all access to settings and the operating system and isolate the devices as completely as possible. That's not happening here.

So, in the worst-case scenario, this is what happens in class: while the teachers at the front think they are teaching digitally, the children at the back are entertaining themselves with game apps, WhatsApp, SnapChat, and whatever else on their school tablets.

Open gates - free internet in schools

Even in elementary schools, many children carry cell phones. This has its advantages: when classes are canceled—which happens often—and they are suddenly sent home, they can inform their working parents in time so that they can pick them up.

However, with these devices, children have permanent access to absolutely ALL content available on the internet—WITHOUT any control—especially during breaks. Of course, it would be nice if they only visited the many well-intentioned websites and apps for children and young people. But many other sites are more tempting, including the most violent and pornographic sites. And children are approachable, open, and therefore unprotected, accessible and influenceable by anyone.

There is no youth media protection as in traditional media (link to text in German), no state or other form of public control of the vast amount of content. Nor is there any restriction of access, as in other public buildings.

This is how parents know their kids and teens: lying down with their phones

Social media and teenagers in a permanent digital coma

Social media companies are upgrading their technology. The question is: Are children ready for this? The mechanisms of new channels such as TikTok are quite simple, but very effective:

Everything that keeps children at a medium level of engagement, not too strong and not too weak, is offered to them, accompanied by audio and video.
It is noted, classified, compared, individually assigned, and constantly enriched with moving and exciting content based on viewing time.
Short, fast clips: funny—but not too much. Exciting and thrilling—but not too much.
Comfortably emotional, with music, heart, and a tiny bit of pain—this is how children today experience their new adventures and those of their generation.

This keeps users hooked, so that they don't want to let go.

Compared to this, Facebook is an intellectually stimulating medium. After all, there is still a bit of writing here and not just content created with AI-generated voices (in the local language, fast & cheap), the simplest character codes, emotional music, and simple video stimuli: sex, cats, dogs, violence, other animals, scary images, and so on.

Children's nightmare Class chat on WhatsApp—where children turn into beasts

Who has ever visited a WhatsApp class chat? It's hell. The harshest insults between children, bullying, exclusion, insults, threats of violence, declarations of war, and punishments are the norm here. There is no impulse control, either by the children themselves or, even less so, by adults. Spell check is turned off, and any desire for civilized manners is completely eliminated. Even your own children behave like beasts here. Insulting others more sharply and harshly, firing off messages faster—these are the social skills that are required here. William Golding's “Lord of the Flies” greets you from behind the thicket.

The cell phone: the direct line to the dark side of power

Children also use these channels to communicate with complete strangers. Using simple but sophisticated techniques, these strangers promise them everything under the sun, talking them into and out of things. The problem for many, if not most, children and young people is that they often have no defense mechanisms whatsoever, let alone the ability to recognize situations in which they might need them.

Where and from whom would they learn these? Teachers, parents, and other role models are usually unfamiliar with these worlds of experience or isolate themselves from them. Many children are left alone in the midst of the flood of harmful content that washes over them. Good media education? Ultimately, it is a result of pure chance and other possible positive influences.

The solution for us as parents: no cell phones or tablets. Completely!

How did we as parents solve this issue in our home? We removed all digital devices: cell phones, tablets, everything. Now they only watch a few episodes of a series under supervision in the family living room from time to time.

The result: at first, a grumbling child. But then: drawing, doing homework, better grades, sports—all of that came back at once. The child talks to us and to his siblings. Boredom leads to new ideas about what else to do.

That's how it's going to stay for now. Until his 18th birthday—we'll see.