19th June 2026
HEADLINES By James Munro
TECHNOLOGY PLATFORMS AND SUPPORTING OUR CHILDREN We need to talk about social media again. I know it’s the topic that just won’t seem to leave our dinner tables or our school assemblies. But with the government’s latest proposed limitations on social media networks, it’s a conversation well worth having.
dopamine hit in those exact hyper-reactive reward centres. Expecting a child to self-regulate in the face of billion-dollar algorithms explicitly built to keep them hooked is simply asking the impossible. Without clear, enforced boundaries implemented by us as parents, our children are essentially bringing a baseball bat to a tech-industry gunfight.
I know that we have written regularly in the Headlines about Trust being a core value in the School’s ethos. However, this is a discussion on if? and should we? trust children with technology?
This isn’t just about an extra half hour of scrolling; robust, evidence-based research repeatedly links unrestricted device time to a highly damaging domino effect. Studies show that late-night screen light suppresses melatonin, directly causing poor sleep routines and chronic exhaustion. Over time, this sleep deprivation and heightened digital anxiety feed into emotional avoidance, often manifesting as school avoidance and a drop in attendance. When parents try to step in and break the cycle, the extreme pull of these addictive designs invariably sparks intense household conflict, straining the very relationships our young people need to feel secure.
As adults and parents, our natural instinct is rooted in empathy and trust. We want to be able to look our children in the eye, hand them a device, and trust them to manage their screen time responsibly. We want to believe they will naturally pivot away from inappropriate content, cyberbullying, or the endless scroll. We want them to recognise that it is bedtime, so they should put their phone away and begin to wind down for the night. It’s an honourable desire, because we want to foster independence in our young people, but in the case of phones in particular, I believe we are setting them up to fail. Here is the counterintuitive argument that we should trust our children with devices, and why we are sending them up the creek without a paddle; the deck is heavily stacked against them. Physiologically, a child’s or teenager’s brain is still under major construction. The prefrontal cortex; the area responsible for impulse control, long-term planning, and weighing risks, isn’t fully developed until their mid-twenties. Meanwhile, the reward centres of their brains are firing on all cylinders. Then we allow ‘social media’ platforms to ‘enter the chat’. These platforms aren’t just neutral digital spaces; they are intentionally, masterfully engineered to be addictive. Every like, notification, and autoplaying video is meticulously designed to trigger a
Up until now, implementing those boundaries has felt like an exhausting, lonely battle, with concerns of socially isolating children who do not have the same level of social media access as their peers. The parental restrictions have been incredibly nuanced from household to household, often turning parents into the “bad guys” for enforcing rules that the family next door might not have. That is why I am profoundly thankful for the upcoming wave of legal restrictions and shifting regulations. For the next generation of learners, device management and digital boundaries will no longer be an isolated parenting decision made in a vacuum. Instead, our household rules will be rooted in law and backed by robust physiological evidence. It takes the pressure off our shoulders and creates a unified standard. We aren’t restricting our children because we don’t trust them; we are establishing boundaries because