Account subscription benefits alongside Premium Stories, Editorials,
Opinions and more. Unlock these with Subscription
The View From India
Looking at World Affairs from the Indian perspective.
First Day First Show
News and reviews from the world of cinema and streaming.
Today's Cache
Your download of the top 5 technology stories of the day.
Science For All
The weekly newsletter from science writers takes the jargon out of science and puts the fun in!
Data Point
Decoding the headlines with facts, figures, and numbers
THEdge
At the cutting edge of education and careers
Health Matters
Ramya Kannan writes to you on getting to good health, and staying there
Gender Agenda
Stories from beyond the binary.
The Hindu On Books
Books of the week, reviews, excerpts, new titles and features.
A ban restricts access, but it does not fix the environment around the child. For teenagers building their sense of autonomy, that restriction in itself can cause harm |Image used for representational purpose only
| Photo Credit: AFP
Ask a sixteen-year-old about a social media ban, and you get an answer sharper than most adults arguing about bans. She says, “It doesn’t prepare us for the real world when we will have to deal with these distractions in our life”. The teenager’s response strikes at the core of the ban vs. no ban debate: the necessity to teach and develop self-regulation.
Lawmakers banning social media are working from the angle that if we remove the option altogether, the posting, compulsive scrolling, and ensuing anxiety will go away with it. The opposing argument is that bans prevent self-regulation, built through practice with social media access readily available.
Behavioral science has a fairly precise answer for which of these arguments holds up.
The bans themselves are moving fast and in earnest around the world. Australia was the first country to impose a sweeping ban on social media outright for children under-16 in 2025. Multiple countries in the EU are attempting to follow suit. These decisions to ban social media rest on neuroscientific insights showing that the human brain’s reward circuitry matures years before the prefrontal cortex that reins it in, leaving adolescents genuinely more vulnerable to engineered design working actively to grab their attention. Lawmakers are right to take this seriously.