The UK’s mission to keep kids off screens and in the real world
The government’s newly issued guidance for parents to keep their children away from screens is part of an ongoing effort it is making to claw back childhood from the grip of algorithmic content and social media.
On Friday 27 March, the government issued new guidance for parents to help them decide how much screen time to allow their children.
It said that given the choice, it would always act to support parents to keep children safe rather than stepping back and leaving parents to handle technological limitations alone.
The government has issued new guidance stating that screen time for under-twos should be avoided completely, other than for shared activities that encourage bonding and interaction.
For two-to-five-year-olds, no more than an hour of screen time a day is advised, and not at mealtimes or before bed.
In terms of the content young children should be watching, the government advised slow-paced, age-appropriate content over fast-paced social media videos or letting them play with AI tools.
It added that co-watching, where parents and children participate in engaging with content together, is always the preferred mode of interaction with digital content.
“There will be some who will oppose us doing this,” Prime Minister Keir Starmer said upon introducing the new guidance.
“But whether it’s navigating technology, tackling the cost of living or balancing the demands of family life, I will always stand on the side of parents doing their best for their children.”
Protecting teens from the dangers of social media
The UK’s interest in keeping young people away from social media and reducing screen time is not limited to guidance for parents.
Around the same time as this guidance was issued, the government announced that it would test interventions, including outright social media bans, daily time limits, and overnight digital curfews, on teenagers across the country.
The goal of these trials, which will involve 300 families with teenagers aged 13 to 17, is to gather hard evidence on how these restrictions affect sleep, family interactions, school performance, and overall well-being.
The government is also running a consultation on “growing up in the online world”, which polls parents and children nationally to better understand how technology impacts children’s wellbeing and what measures it can take to protect children from the dangers of increasingly predatory online algorithms that commodify attention.
It has also launched a major public consultation to consider a sweeping ban on social media platforms for all people in the UK aged under 16 years old.
The proposals draw inspiration from Australia, which became the first country to enact a nationwide social media ban for under-16s in late 2025.
That law prohibits children from creating or maintaining accounts on major platforms – including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, X, YouTube, Threads, Reddit, and others – with platforms required to enforce age restrictions through verification methods.
The long reach of the Online Safety Act
All of these trials, guidance, and consultations are auxiliaries to the vanguard of the government’s latest efforts to protect young people online – the Online Safety Act.
The Online Safety Act, which took full effect last year, imposes a duty on platforms and content providers to protect children from illegal and harmful content with robust age assurance checks.
Gone are the days when the UK’s digital watchdog was content with trusting users to declare they were at least 18 years old via a quick checkbox. The new age-gating mechanisms it demands require users to scan their face, upload documentation, or share their credit card information to prove their age.
Ways to circumvent these age assurance checks, such as VPNs that allow users to appear as if they are located in another country when browsing websites, are already under scrutiny, with the government considering a ban on under-18s using VPNs in the country.
The effects of the Online Safety Act and the extent of its enforcement are still reverberating through the digital world, with Apple recently taking the significant step of requiring all iPhone users to verify their age or be locked off from content on their handsets.
The regulator praised this effort and noted that it helped implement this age-gating, and it has already urged others to follow Apple’s example.
It is not clear the extent to which the government will require platforms and even hardware providers to police the age of their users, or whether it will place more trust in parents’ ability to control their children’s behaviour and content consumption.
The effect of the latter path is clear: in the government’s most recently published guidance, it noted that 98% of two-year-olds watch screens every day.
What is clear is that the UK government is one of the earliest combatants around the world against big tech’s grip on childhood. It joins Australia and few others as those nations that have drawn a line in the sand against algorithmically addictive social media platforms in an effort to protect their young citizens from the risks associated with the modern attention economy.
