Every generation has its bogeyman.In the 1950s it was Elvis Presley’s hips and rock ’n’ roll—psychologists warned it would turn teenagers into sex-crazed delinquents. In the 1970s and 80s it was Dungeons & Dragons (literally blamed for suicides and satanism). In the 1990s it was violent video games and Marilyn Manson. In the early 2000s it was television itself: “Kids are watching six hours a day and it’s melting their brains!”

In 2025 the panic button is labeled “TikTok.”And just like every previous moral panic, adults are frantically hunting for evidence that something—anything—is catastrophically wrong with what the kids are doing… because deep down many of us suspect the real problem might be our own parenting.

1. The Research Is Far Less Scary Than the Headlines

Let’s look at the actual science, not the cherry-picked doom studies that dominate Brussels press releases.

* The strongest, most rigorous studies (repeated-measure, longitudinal, pre-registered) find tiny effects. Example: A 2023 study of 480,000 adolescents across 40 countries (Vuorre et al., Nature Human Behaviour) found that social media use explains less than 1 % of variation in life satisfaction. The effect of social media on well-being is smaller than the effect of eating breakfast or wearing glasses.

* Jonathan Haidt’s famous claim that “social media caused the teen mental health crisis” has been repeatedly debunked. Orben & Przybylski (2022) re-analyzed the same datasets Haidt uses and showed that when you control for prior mental health, the correlation between social media and depression almost disappears. In plain English: depressed kids use social media more, not the other way round.

* The “smartphone generation is doomed” graph that went viral? It falls apart when you include boys (who game more than scroll) or when you look at countries outside the Anglosphere. In South Korea and Japan, kids spend far more time online and have lower suicide rates than in the 1990s.

* Experimental evidence is even more sobering. When researchers force teens to quit Instagram for a month (the strongest design possible), depression drops… by about 0.1 standard deviations. That’s roughly the same boost you get from one extra hour of sleep or eating an extra portion of vegetables. Helpful? Yes. Civilization-ending? Hardly.

* Positive effects are routinely ignored. A 2024 meta-analysis (Kreszynski et al.) found that active social media use (messaging friends, posting, joining interest groups) is associated with higher social capital, lower loneliness, and better identity exploration—especially for LGBTQ+ youth and neurodivergent kids who find their tribe online long before they do in real life.

In short: the science shows modest risks for heavy, passive, late-night use (exactly like television did), and modest benefits for active, social use. Nothing that justifies treating Instagram like cigarettes for children.

2. Projection in Action: “It’s for the Children” (Really?)

Psychologists call it displacement: adults feel guilty about their own compulsive scrolling, their inability to put the phone down at dinner, their doom-scrolling at 2 a.m.—so they project that guilt onto their children and demand lawmakers “do something.”

The European Parliament’s resolution was co-authored by politicians who themselves refresh X every five minutes. Ursula von der Leyen gave a speech about addictive algorithms while standing in front of a giant screen looping TikTok-style videos. The irony is thick enough to spread on bread.

When French senators say “we must protect children from the tsunami of Big Tech,” ask yourself: who exactly is addicted here? My 10-year-old can happily walk away from Roblox to play outside. Many adults in that Senate chamber cannot walk away from their notifications for ten minutes.

3. Self-Preservation and Personal Responsibility Trump Blanket Bans

Every child is different.Some 11-year-olds handle Discord servers with maturity that would shame most corporate managers. Others melt down if they lose one game of Fortnite. A law that treats both the same is not protection—it’s laziness.

The countries that score highest on adolescent well-being (Netherlands, Denmark—before they started panicking) have one thing in common: they trust parents and teach digital literacy from age six, not top-down prohibitions. Dutch schools have “mediawijzer” classes where kids learn to spot fake news, manage screen time, and mute toxic group chats. Result? Dutch teens use social media just as much as French teens but report higher life satisfaction and less cyberbullying.

Compare that to Spain, which introduced strict age limits in 2024: kids simply lie about their age more creatively, parents are kept in the dark, and underground “burner” accounts explode. The law didn’t reduce harm—it reduced honest conversation.

4. History Rhymes—And It Laughs at Us

* 1956: American Psychological Association warns rock ’n’ roll causes “hyper-stimulation of the nervous system.” Outcome: the greatest musical revolution in history.

* 1985: Tipper Gore’s PMRC tries to ban heavy metal lyrics. Outcome: Metallica sells 120 million albums.

* 2001: Grand Theft Auto III is blamed for school shootings. Outcome: violent crime among youth continues its 30-year decline.

Every single time, the kids were fine. The ones who weren’t fine would have broken on comic books, pinball machines, or the next shiny thing. Weak individuals exist in every cohort; culture does not collapse because of Elvis’s pelvis.

The Real Way Forward

Teach children self-regulation, not prohibition.Give them the tools to notice when an app is wasting their life, just like we taught them to notice when they’re full at dinner. My kids already do it: “Dad, this game is boring, the algorithm only shows me trash now.” That sentence—from a 10-year-old—is worth a thousand EU regulations.

Europe is about to repeat every moral panic of the last 70 years, only this time with the full coercive power of a supranational state. History will laugh again. And in twenty years, today’s banned 12-year-olds will be the engineers building the AI companions that make all of us feel like kings—while lawmakers scratch their heads wondering why this generation turned out so resilient.

Don’t rob children of their future out of adult anxiety.Parent them. Trust them. Teach them.That has always worked better than any law ever written.

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