Written by Kim Samuel, Founder & Chief Architect, Belonging Forum

As the UK Government’s consultation on children’s social media use drew to a close, Ellen Roome went to Downing Street with other bereaved families and a question no parent should ever have to ask.

What did my child see online before he died?

Her son, Jools Sweeney, was 14. Since his death, she has fought for answers about whether social media may have played a part. She is not alone.

Other parents, carrying their own unbearable losses, are urging the Prime Minister, to move faster and go further: to ban social media for under-16s unless and until it can be made safe.

This Is About Children’s Lives, Not Screen Time

That is why this debate has such force around the world today. It is not merely about screen time, teenage distraction or school rules. It is about children who are no longer here. It is about parents who believe platforms may know more about their child’s final hours than they do. It is about the terrible imbalance between families searching for truth and powerful, global technology companies built to extract attention, data and profit.

Much of the digital world was not designed for children’s wellbeing. It was designed to hold attention, monetize emotion and learn vulnerabilities. It rewards compulsion. It amplifies comparison. It can turn sadness into a feed, insecurity into a business model and a private adolescent struggle into something intensified by an algorithm.

No serious person can look at the evidence on anxiety, self-harm, addictive design, sexualized content, violent material and algorithmic extremity and conclude that nothing must change. Something has gone badly wrong when childhood is being shaped by systems no child can understand, no parent can fully monitor, and no teacher can reasonably be expected to counter alone.

So yes, the Government is right to act. The question is how.

A Ban Has Moral Force — But Also Limits

An Australia-style ban on social media for under-16s has a powerful simplicity. It draws a neat line. It gives exhausted parents clarity and the backing of the law. In a world where individual families feel they are negotiating with trillion-dollar companies from the kitchen table, the law can shift the burden away from parents and back towards the platforms that created these risks.

But if today’s debate becomes only a contest between “ban it” and “leave children to it,” we will fail young people again.

Because social media is not one thing in a child’s life. It is a source of harm for some, a source of pressure for many and, for others, a fragile thread of connection.

For a lonely teenager in a rural town, a young person exploring their identity, a migrant child keeping culture and family within reach or a neurodivergent child who finds the school corridor or the playground.

This does not make platforms safe. It does not excuse their failures. But it should make us careful. Some of the young people most at risk online are also among those most dependent on digital connection.

For Some Children, Online Spaces Are Also A Lifeline

A child being bullied at school may find support in a community beyond it. A young carer may find others who understand responsibilities their classmates cannot imagine. A teenager with disabilities, or a child growing up in poverty or isolation, may find friendship, advice and recognition in spaces that are otherwise closed to them.

For these children, digital networks are not simply entertainment. They can be a way of being seen.

That is why a ban, on its own, cannot be the whole answer. It may reduce some exposure to harm, but it may also remove access to support from the children who have least of it elsewhere. It may make adults feel that a problem has been solved when, in reality, some young people have simply been pushed further out of sight.

Children Need Preparation, Not A Sudden Cliff Edge

Children do not become digitally wise by magic on their sixteenth birthday.

We would never take another powerful technology and manage it this way. We do not hand a young person car keys one day and wish them luck. We teach, supervise, restrict, test and gradually expand responsibility. The online world now requires the same seriousness.

We need phased access. We need digital wellbeing education that begins early and grows with the child. We need parents to be given practical support, not just blame. We need schools equipped to teach online life as part of modern life. And we need platforms forced to redesign the features that make children less safe, including infinite scroll, addictive notifications, live-streaming risks, algorithmic rabbit holes and systems that turn distress into engagement.

Most of all, we need to stop talking as if children are the problem to be managed.

The answer cannot be a cliff edge at 16, where young people are kept away from social media and then suddenly expected to navigate it alone.

Safety And Belonging Must Go Together

Online safety education is now as essential as teaching children how to cross a busy road. We do not protect young people by pretending the road does not exist. We protect them by teaching them where the dangers are, how to move through them and when to ask for help.

Today’s grieving families deserve action. They deserve more than warm words, consultations and delay. They deserve a government willing to confront the power of platforms and the cost of inaction.

But our children deserve more than prohibition alone. They deserve something much harder and more hopeful: a society willing to protect them from harm while also preparing them to belong, safely and wisely, in the world they are growing up in.