Why social media bans won’t make parenting teenagers easier

Countries around the world, including France, Spain and Malaysia, are planning to follow Australia in enacting a ban on young people using social media. And now the UK is considering moving in the same direction.

These bans have emerged out of concerns about the effects of social media on children’s mental health, and increasing attempts to regulate teenage life. The UK recently brought in a “lifetime” smoking ban for anyone aged 15 or younger.

The potential ban on social media use is often explicitly justified by the support of parents. When announcing her party’s support for the measure, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said she knew “as a parent” that a ban was needed. It is seen as common sense that parents are leading proponents of these bans.

Bans offer two core promises to parents. They offer protection from the perceived harms of social media, and greater simplicity in managing day-to-day life. Rather than parents having to negotiate their child’s social media, parents may believe that once a ban is in place, they can simply say to their children that this behaviour is not allowed.

Official sanction can be used by parents as evidence that society views children’s use of social media as unacceptable. But in order to fulfil these promises, bans would need to be highly effective and socially endorsed. There are strong reasons to think this won’t be the case.

Teenage rebellion

Far from being passive, teenagers are technologically literate, socially networked and highly motivated. Recent UK experience with age verification for certain websites shows how quickly workarounds spread.

Since the passing of the Online Safety Act, the UK has seen a huge surge in downloads of virtual private networks (VPNs). These allow users to register as being from a different country to the one they are physically in. Teenagers may be able to use VPNs to bypass the bans.

They can also circumvent parental controls in less technologically savvy ways. This might mean buying a burner phone from a friend to access social media outside of their parents’ evening restrictions. Anecdotally, there are similar accounts of school children finding workarounds to avoid the increasingly prevalent “pouches” that restrict access to smartphones during the school day.

The larger lesson here is that by forcing behaviour to become covert, parents can often lose oversight of what their children are doing.

These examples are not too different to traditional tricks to get around social bans, like having a fake ID or getting an older friend to purchase cigarettes or alcohol. If parents reflect on their own experiences of teenage life, it may be evident why the act of banning does not eliminate this behaviour – and may even increase its attraction.

Even more importantly, as we also know in relation to alcohol or sexual activity, just because it is prohibited doesn’t take away the necessity of parents having conversations with their children about these topics.

Parents know that even if they harshly sanction their children for underage drinking, their child’s peers may have parents who turn a blind eye, condone alcohol, or supply it themselves. This means that getting teenagers to think about their use is essential – and the same holds true for social media.

Whether there is a ban or not, prohibited teenage behaviour continues. Navigating these risks is an unavoidable part of parenting adolescents.

As we have argued, parenting should be seen less as about achieving specified outcomes, and more as about valuing the individual relationship.

Putting the relationship between parent and child centre-stage means recognising there are different positions on the use and value of social media, and managing those differences successfully.

While digital life is novel and frankly scary to some parents, seeing the issue in a wider context of teenage life – sometimes risky, contested and hidden – makes these new issues more explicable to older generations.

Just as parenting requires understanding why a young person might choose to drink, have sex or use drugs, the case of social media also depends on understanding teenagers’ (online) worlds. This means engaging with the value and benefits of social media, and gaining some understanding of what platforms are being used and their content.

This is not to say that more effective regulation is impossible, just as legal regulation is important for other dangers that children and teenagers face. However, such regulation will not – and cannot – take away parents’ involvement, and its related challenges.

Funding provided by Economic and Social Research Council (ES/W002639/1) for Centre for Socio-Digital Futures ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures | Research | University of Bristol

Tim Fowler does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.