Aaron Langmaid: Banning social media for under 16s will slow the flood of unfiltered content reaching young minds

We’re all participants in an untested chapter of human existence, squinting and scrolling our way to an era of isolation. But there is still hope for our children if we hit the pause button.

In our household of five, we have succeeded in at least one nightly ritual.

In a charging cradle on top of an old vintage cabinet in the corner of our living room sits our teenage daughter’s mobile phone.

It is placed there each night at 6pm and stays until school departure the next morning.

And though it has been the centre of rigorous debate, there it remains – a monument to an agreement between parent and child.

The government’s decision to implement a ban on social media for anybody aged under 16 at first sat uncomfortably with us.

The teenager’s phone is placed on charge at 6pm each night. Picture: iStock

Read more: How Australia’s social media ban will work

In a world where legislative authorities increasingly wrestle for more control, why must our government encroach on the decisions reached behind suburban front doors?

Our vintage cabinet and the technology resting upon it is a representation of the inroads we have achieved as a family, through honest and robust debate.

The government’s decision to implement a ban on social media for anybody aged under 16 at first sat uncomfortably with us. Picture: iStock

But it was a chamber of an entirely different kind where arguments to release parents of that responsibility played out late last year.

In supporting the passage of the cyber safety legislation, then-shadow communications minister David Coleman offered at least one daft dad more clarity.

He said the protection of our children from social media was one of the defining issues of our era.

This was not political grandstanding.

He pointed to the correlation between the spiralling mental health of teenagers, particularly girls.

The advent of the smartphone circa 2007 correlated with a three-fold increase in self-harm hospitalisations for girls up to the age of 14 from 2008 to 2021.

Author and global campaigner Jonathon Haidt says the use of social media aligns with the greatest of ironies – the more you immerse yourself in it, the more lonely and depressed you become.

Perhaps it’s easier for those born in the late ’70s and early ’80s – those who lived through the progression from cassette tape to CD and on to digital.

It is that analog upbringing which grants the ability to put our phones down, to switch off.

But our kids can’t, in part because they have never had to.

That is why this father of three is no longer sitting on the fence.

A ban on social media may seem like wild government overreach for any conservative thinker. But something has to give.

Silently charging on our living room shrine, our teenager’s phone lights up long into the night.

It buzzes to life with every message, picture, link or meme that is shared and liked and laughed at long into the small hours.

A ban on social media may seem like wild government overreach for any conservative thinker. Picture: iStock

The parameters we chose to set will remain in place for at least another year or two.

As Coleman explained, the ban on under-16s on socials is about keeping kids out of unsafe environments; ensuring youth aren’t bound by reckless words and images from their bedroom dark.

It’s not perfect – teenagers will almost certainly find a workaround, probably with a click of a button – but that will bean issue for parents to navigate.

However, other questions certainly remain.

With a string of bizarre arrests playing out in the UK – a result of Labour’s draconian freedom-of-speech laws – we must ask how long before our own eSafety Commissioner’s posturing to protect kids becomes a mechanism to control adults.

We can only hope the proponents of this legislation are right; that this won’t become an assault on free expression.

From December 10, Australia will enforce one of the world’s toughest social media bans for teens under 16. The new legislation was prompted by News Corp’s Let Them Be Kids campaign.

It’s a pause button, a bid to slow the flood of unfiltered content reaching young minds and, at least for us, allow a 15-year-old one more year of undisturbed sleep.

We are all zombies. On trains. Stopped at traffic lights. Stumbling down footpaths or sitting in bars.

Our kids shouldn’t be. Their necks should not be arched downward at school bus stops or railway stations.

Yet here we are, participants in an untested chapter of human existence, squinting and scrolling our way to an era of isolation.

If we are indeed a step closer to The Matrix, let’s hope the kids we are trying to protect might somehow save us from it.

Aaron Langmaid is a Melbourne writer and Sky News Australia producer