The debate over children and social media is often framed as a question of parental control or technological inevitability. It should not be. At its core, this is a moral question about what kind of society we are shaping, what we choose to protect, and what we are willing to sacrifice in the name of convenience, profit and false notions of freedom.
Children under the age of 13 should not be on social media. Not because technology is evil, but because childhood is fragile and social media is not built for moral development.
At this stage of life, children are still forming their identity, learning boundaries, and developing the capacity for judgment and self-regulation. Neuroscience is clear: Impulse control, emotional regulation and critical thinking mature well into adolescence. Social media, by contrast, is designed to exploit impulse, reward comparison, and intensify emotion. It does not educate young minds; it conditions them.
What children encounter online is rarely neutral. Content is optimized not for truth, growth or well-being but for engagement. Shock travels faster than nuance. Sexualized imagery appears long before children can contextualize it. Violence is stripped of consequence. Cruelty is reframed as humor. Validation becomes currency, and self-worth becomes a public negotiation.
This is not harmless exposure. It is moral interference at scale.
Much of the harm is subtle and therefore dismissed. Children are not typically pushed toward overtly illegal or extreme material. Instead, they are nudged slowly and persistently toward distorted norms about relationships, body image, success and identity. Algorithms learn what unsettles, excites or angers a child and deliver more of it. The child does not choose this environment; it is curated around them without their understanding or consent.
The result is corruption without awareness. Anxiety, depression, aggression and social withdrawal often appear later, long after the source has been normalized.
There is also a deeper ecosystem at work, one most parents never see. While children may never intentionally access the darkest corners of the internet, the culture shaped there does not remain contained. Exploitation, predation, dehumanization and nihilism bleed upward into mainstream platforms through trends, language and aesthetics. By the time this content reaches children, it has been sanitized just enough to avoid scrutiny, but not enough to avoid harm.
Children do not need to visit the dark web to absorb its values.
Tech companies know this. Internal research, much of it reluctantly disclosed, has repeatedly shown harm to young users. Yet enforcement of age limits remains performative at best. Why? Because early engagement builds lifelong consumers. Attention is monetized. Addiction is profitable. And responsibility is quietly outsourced to parents, who cannot reasonably compete with billion-dollar behavioral engineering.
This is not simply a failure of parenting. It is institutional negligence disguised as innovation.
Some argue that banning children under 13 from social media infringes on freedom or limits digital literacy. That argument confuses preparation with exposure. We do not teach children to swim by throwing them into open water. We do not prepare them for adulthood by immersing them in adult environments prematurely. Childhood is not a training ground for markets; it is a protected space for moral formation.
A ban is not censorship. It is a boundary. We already draw such lines in countless areas of life: labor laws, age restrictions, content ratings and consent standards. These are not arbitrary. They exist because we recognize that some environments are incompatible with healthy development.
The cost of ignoring this reality is visible everywhere: rising youth anxiety, fractured identity, diminished attention spans and a generation struggling to distinguish authenticity from performance. These are not isolated trends. They are symptoms of a culture that has confused access with progress, and profit with purpose.
A society that allows children to be shaped by anonymous influence, algorithmic manipulation and unaccountable power cannot later claim innocence when those children grow into distrustful, disconnected adults. Moral development cannot be crowdsourced. It must be protected.
Banning children under 13 from social media is not a retreat from modern life. It is an assertion of responsibility.
The question is no longer whether harm exists. The question is whether we are willing to act or whether we will continue to sacrifice childhood on the altar of convenience and greed, then pretend we did not see it coming.
Armstrong Williams is manager/sole owner of Howard Stirk Holdings I & II Broadcast Television Stations and the 2016 Multicultural Media Broadcast owner of the year. To find out more about him and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2026 CREATORS.COM
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