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As a parent who gave my oldest child a (very used) smartphone just before she turned 14, I would be in favor of making smartphones illegal under age 15 (or some

As a parent who gave my oldest child a (very used) smartphone just before she turned 14, I would be in favor of making smartphones illegal under age 15 (or some other number, higher or lower I don't care). I'm pretty sure they're worse than cigarettes for the future of humanity.

OhioMan2943 11mo ago
Far worse.
arcfour 11mo ago
As a parent, you should be able to parent your child, rather than having the government arbitrarily and capriciously do so on your behalf, and for everyone else's kids, too. As someone who got my first BlackBerry at 11, which really spurred a lot of my later interests which are now part of my career or led to it indirectly, I am opposed to paternalistic authoritarian governments making choices for everyone. (Funny anecdote, but I didn't even figure out how to sign up for Facebook until I was 11-12, because I wouldn't lie about my age and it would tell me I was too young. Heh.)
- mrtesthah 11mo ago
  The problem is the kid feeling left out at school when they're the only one without a smartphone and can't participate in their friends' activities.
  - arcfour 11mo ago
    ...and this needs to be solved with a law? Kids feeling left out over something well and truly inconsequentual?
    - foobarian 11mo ago
      Who needs laws! Let's also let them all smoke cigarettes too then while we're at it.
      - mothballed 11mo ago
        Lol you can order a cigar or pipe tobacco on the internet completely legally without any ID check. Most people don't know this. You can do it with wine, too, for the vast majority of the US. It's not really a problem.
        cycomanic 11mo ago
        I suspect you need a credit card though? Can kids sign credit card contracts without parent consent in the US? Moreover just because that laws and regulations are applied inconsistently in the US (and we are talking about Denmark here), does not mean we should completely do away with them.
        mothballed 11mo ago
        Not sure if it's changed but I had a debit card and bank account from age 15 when I started working as a kid. I got it without even involving my parents, not sure if you can still do that now, it was before the KYC stuff ramped up to the nines.
    - angiolillo 11mo ago
      Not necessarily a law, but it requires some form of collective action. I highly recommend discussing a smartphone pact such as http://waituntil8th.org http://waituntil8th.org with fellow parents before anyone in their friend group gets a cell phone.
      - GaryBluto 11mo ago
        > Find out why smartphones need to be delayed in your home (emphasis mine) Do parents actually fall for this drivel?
    - deleted 11mo ago
      [deleted]
- dlisboa 11mo ago
  Social media in the early 2000s is nothing like today.
  - arcfour 11mo ago
    You're right, kids in the 2000s actually wanted to use social media. It's a dying industry—appropriate timing for a government to make a law to save kids from the evils of it.
    - zurfer 11mo ago
      The issue is rather the algorithmic feed optimized for grabbing our attention. It's definitely addictive and should be regulated like other drugs. Give people technology, but let's have an honest conversation about it finally. As a adult it's already hard to muster enough self control to not keep scrolling.
      - arcfour 11mo ago
        Okay, so explain this to your child, just like you tell them they shouldn't do drugs. Are there not people who are sober by choice? The only thing preventing you from going and smoking crack right now is most certainly not because it's illegal, but because you make a choice not to do so, knowing the negative effects it has on you. I don't scroll social media. When I was 14-17, sure. But then I lost interest, much like most of my peers did. (I do probably refresh HN more than I should though, but I think that's probably the least evil thing I could do compulsively...)
        AOsborn 11mo ago
        The part you’re missing is that the decision to be online isn’t like choosing to do drugs. It’s closer to deciding to go to parties and socialise at all. Social media for teens is ubiquitous and where your peers connect. It’s being included in your social group, not opt-in thrill seeking. Most teens will have multiple accounts for various networks - private accounts for their friends, and then again for closer friends. Or they use apps like Discord that parents have no visibility into at all. There is a lot that most parents never see. For better or worse.
- dmje 11mo ago
  Yeh, no. Parents are doing what they can, but it inevitably comes down to “but my friend x has it so why can’t I have it” - so all and any help from government / schools is a good thing. This is so, so, so obviously a nasty, dangerous technology - young brains should absolutely not be exposed to it. In all honesty, neither should older ones, but that’s not what we’re considering here.
  - arcfour 11mo ago
    "Because I'm your parent, and I said no." Do you buy your kids a toy every time you go to the store? Do you feed them candy for dinner?
    - davzie 11mo ago
      Neither of those examples result in social ostracism from peers.
      - arcfour 11mo ago
        I think you are massively overstating how important it is to the kids that they have a social media account. How can it hold that kids would be ignored in real life because they don't interact virtually?
        josephg 11mo ago
        > How can it hold that kids would be ignored in real life because they don't interact virtually? Easy. If half the conversation happens online, and your kid wasn’t part of that, they’d constantly need to be “filled in” when they got to school. Imagine if your company used slack but you weren’t on it. You could still go to all the meetings, but there would have been conversations held and decisions made that you wouldn’t even know about. You would feel like you were on the out. Banning an individual kid from social media would be just the same.
        arcfour 11mo ago
- thatguy0900 11mo ago
  Comparing the internet we grew up with and the modern internet where a army of psychologists have been unleashed with the express intent to massively increase addiction to everything they touch is very foolish
  - arcfour 11mo ago
    Demanding a law because you are unable to tell your kids "no" makes you the bigger fool.
    - mothballed 11mo ago
      The same people demanding the anti-smart phone laws will rat your ass out the second your kid is spotted walking alone, playing independently, etc. They want to put you in a catch-22 situation. The real problem here is way less people are parents or people that have no idea what parenting is like, so they don't understand the practicalities of raising children so they come up with the dumbest laws possible and then lord it over you with the full weigh of the state so they can pretend to be parents but with none of the responsibility and all of the smug moral superiority.
      - thatguy0900 11mo ago
        The people doing that are themselves victims of social media and news fear mongering and engagement maxxing
      - hobom 11mo ago
        Jonathan Haidt, the most prominent psychologist pushing for restrictions on social media use for children, is also the most prominent proponent of letting kids play and roam more freely. So no, those are not the same people.
    - thatguy0900 11mo ago
      This is not about telling kids no. This is about companies (and foreign hostile governments!) worth billions of dollars openly studying how best to prey on children's minds. There are things that are just poisonous to society as a concept.
- beloch 11mo ago
  First, if some parents let their kids use social media and some don't, all kids will eventually use it. You can't cut kids off from social spaces their peers are using and expect them to obey. Second, this move by Denmark reflects a failure to regulate what social media companies have been doing to all their users. e.g. What has Meta done to address their failures in Myanmar?[1] As little as was legally possible, and that was as close to nothing as makes no difference. More recently, Meta's own projections indicate 10% of their ad revenue comes from fraud[2]. The real proportion is almost certainly higher, but Meta refuses to take action. Any attempts to tax or regulate American social media companies has invited swift and merciless response from the U.S. government. To make matters worse, U.S. law makes it impossible for American companies to respect the privacy of consumers in non-U.S. markets[3]. Put it all together, and American social media is something that children need to be protected from, but the only way to protect them is to cut them off from it entirely. This is the direct result of companies like Meta refusing to respond to concerns in any way other than lobbying the U.S. government to bully other nations into accepting their products as is. Good on Denmark. I hope my own country follows suit. ------------ [1]https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-facebooks-systems-promoted-violence-against-rohingya-meta-owes-reparations-new-report/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb... [2]https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortune-deluge-fraudulent-ads-documents-show-2025-11-06/ https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu... [3]https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2025/07/22/microsoft-cant-keep-eu-data-safe-from-us-authorities/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2025/07/22/micro...
- HeinzStuckeIt 11mo ago
  Cultures around the world have barred children from certain social places until they go through a rite of passage that the whole society, not just the parents, recognize.
  - arcfour 11mo ago
    Yes, cultures around the world have done this through parents parenting their child successfully, and not through arbitrary government overreach telling you how to parent.
    - HeinzStuckeIt 11mo ago
      Not really. The ideal you are describing, where there is no role for the community in regulating public spaces outside the household and determining when young people can enter them, strikes me as highly unusual historically and geographically. It’s an example of that streak of libertarianism that took off from early American internet culture and hardly exists outside internet pontificating.
- cycomanic 11mo ago
  As someone who sold their first joint at 11, which really spurred a lot of my later interests which are now part of my career or let to it indirectly, I am opposed to paternalistic authoritarian governments making choices for everyone. /s Absolute statements like yours rarely work, because the discussion is hardly ever about absolutes and more about where to draw the line.
SunshineTheCat 11mo ago
Crazy to think how less government would need to act like a mom if there were one or two parents out there who were familiar with the word "no."
- mikkupikku 11mo ago
  Let's do away with the laws requiring shops to check ID before selling cigarettes. After all, a parent can simply tell their child not to smoke cigarettes and that's clearly good enough, right? All in the name of less government, which is clearly the most important priority here.
  - card_zero 11mo ago
    You make a persuasive case, but nicotine is genuinely addictive. Something to do with releasing stored glucose and substituting for food, and causing irritability on what I take to be a physiological level on withdrawal. Otherwise I'd agree.
    - benregenspan 11mo ago
      But in this context, is it so important to distinguish between whether something is physiologically addictive vs. just seriously habit-forming? Except for substances where withdrawal is genuinely life-threatening, the practical difference seems to be in degree, not kind. Nicotine withdrawal causes irritability, but (I know having experienced both) so can breaking a bad social media habit. (And it seems like there's a physiological basis to both cases, it's just that one involves endogenous chemicals and the other doesn't)
  - ipaddr 11mo ago
    That system has massive holes. Using convenience store employees many recent immigrants to be the gatekeeper to cigarettes for your kids seems foolish. Who trusts that last line of defense? If a kid fails at once location another location will succeed and there are no punishment for attempting to purchase underage.
- 11mo ago
willio58 11mo ago
Agreed. Teachers are seeing the massive benefits from banning phones entirely during school hours. I think once we get data from bans for certain things like social media for kids, we'll all want to get on the wave.
- colechristensen 11mo ago
  This has to be done carefully because prohibition breeds desire and adults will absolutely try to force the attitude of 35 year olds onto 15 year olds forgetting a lot of life lessons have to be learned through experience and not just told. Everybody wants to get on the wave about how children these days are so much worse because of the new thing. And literally as long as we have recorded human writing we have adults complaining how the children are being ruined by the new culture or new item... and I mean we have these complaints from thousands of years ago. So be careful, you don't have to be completely wrong to still be overreaching.
  - logifail 11mo ago
    > prohibition breeds desire Sure, but we (as societies) have always had to deal with this. Wherever you are in the world there are things that simply aren't allowed under a certain age, whether that's 15, 16, 18, 21 or whatever. My (just turned) 16 year old told me last that he didn't think it looked to be that hard to drive a car. Me: "Umm. You'll find out. When you get to it."
    - wizzwizz4 11mo ago
      It's not that hard to drive a car! Unfortunately, physics motivates us to have unreasonable expectations of our drivers, like "doesn't drive off the road at 100km/h ever", and "avoids all obstacles all of the time". That's the hard part.
    - tintor 11mo ago
      It doesn't look to be that hard to be a dentist. You drill a dark spot on tooth and put some resin inside to fill it up. /s
angiolillo 11mo ago
I'm not sure how I feel about making it illegal, but it does benefit from some sort of collective action. If none of your child's friends and classmates have cell phones yet, I'd strongly encourage establishing a smartphone pact with the other parents. Our community used http://waituntil8th.org http://waituntil8th.org pledges but even a shared spreadsheet would work.
- colechristensen 11mo ago
  One of the things that seems necessary is to make it illegal for a kid to use a phone in class before a certain age. If you don't have that you get the rules destroyed by demanding parents bullying administrators and school boards.
  - angiolillo 11mo ago
    > the rules destroyed by demanding parents bullying administrators and school boards True, but that's why you don't do it alone. You need to talk with other parents and encourage them to talk to others until the majority of parents understand the risks and let the administration, school board, and teachers know that they have your support.
- dyauspitr 11mo ago
  All that local level stuff doesn’t work. As soon as a couple of kids have a smartphone, the online world becomes vastly more interesting than the day to day.
  - angiolillo 11mo ago
    > All that local level stuff doesn’t work I can't speak to anyone else, but it seems to be working well enough in our town. The overwhelming majority of kids don't have cell phones until high school. That doesn't mean your kids won't beg you for a smartphone, it just means you can say "no" without socially isolating them. > As soon as a couple of kids have a smartphone The point is to engage in collective action early enough that you can prevent these situations in the first place. Once a critical mass of kids have smartphones and their socialization and coordination moves to online spaces it becomes intensely isolating to be the only kid in a friend group without a smartphone.
eikenberry 11mo ago
I did close to the same with my kids.. their PCs were in a common room, they got their first phone at 14 and it stayed at the downstairs charging station at night until 17. IMO it worked great and both our kids have a healthy relationship with their phones and tech in general.
- teekert 11mo ago
  I got my first smartphone at 23 (an HTC touch) and have an unhealthy relationship with my phone ;) You’re lucky. Some kids do prefer the real world.
  - eikenberry 11mo ago
    When I say they have a "healthy relationship with tech" it doesn't mean they don't use tech, they both are heavily into tech, but don't let it impact their life adversely. It is more a balance that works for that individual than a preference for real vs. tech.
skapadia 11mo ago
1000% agree.
pembrook 11mo ago
Denmark's government has authoritarian aims and are one of the primary groups pushing chat control in the EU. I think you are falling for the "think of the children..." fallacy here. This is a stepping stone towards further control elsewhere, especially once a framework for enforcement is in place (which nobody actually thinks about when emotionally reacting to feel-good ideas like this). How easy would it be to expand ID based age enforcement to tracking ALL online activity and cracking down on "non-approved" speech? No thanks. I'll handle parenting myself. Also, if you don't care about the age number, and think social media is just objectively bad...why are you on this social media site? Isn't posting here the definition of hypocrisy...given you're supporting what you believe to be worse than cigarettes?
- nullify88 11mo ago
  I don't think HN is a social media site. The goals of a social media site is to keep you engaged for as long as possible with the assistance of various algorithms, dark patterns while your data is sold to businesses so they can have a slice of your attention pie via ads and supported content. I dont feel as if any of that applies here. In fact HN has gotten further from a social media site by not displaying comment points.
  - pembrook 11mo ago
    You can argue this, but if you hand over this authority to government, it will not be up to you. Fundamentally this is an upvote driven social media platform no different from Reddit, which everyone agrees is social media. If you live in Denmark, get ready to tie your State ID to your HN profile to login and hope that you don't say anything that would make the wrong official (or your employer) upset with you. As we know from history, well-intentioned government laws have zero unintended consequences, always work perfectly every time, and are very easy to remove once they've been created...
    - Vriska1 11mo ago
      [dead]
    - 11mo ago
lukasm 11mo ago
I fully agree. There should be a complete ban on social media and similar addictive platforms for those under 16, and a nighttime ban (10 p.m.–7 a.m.) for users aged 16 to 18. We basically give cigarettes to children.
- petre 11mo ago
  Why not vice tax the operators? Easier than using age verification schemes and giving them even more data, chat control etc. I'm thinking tiktok, meta and x. Want to operate in Denmark? The license will cost $N/person/month where the amount of people equals the country's population. It's basically a viewer tax.
- soulofmischief 11mo ago
  It is absurd to suggest that children should not be allowed to socialize online. Have we completely forgotten the internet we grew up on? I would be dead if I hadn't been able to make friends online.
  - WhyOhWhyQ 11mo ago
    The internet we grew up on does not exist.
    - ipaddr 11mo ago
      Kids socialize in video games now.
      - WhyOhWhyQ 11mo ago
        When I was a kid I joined a random BBCode forum with a group of 10 people who taught me how to program. There were challenges some passionate person set up and he would give tips to me and a few others for free. We hung out all day. That's gone.
        soulofmischief 11mo ago
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
porsager 11mo ago
If you're a parent then act like one. You're perfectly able to enact that ban yourself - why do you need the governments help?
- owisd 11mo ago
  you can take a teen’s phone off them and they can just walk into a store and buy an inexpensive second hand handset and use the WiFi from a local cafe.
  - JoshTriplett 11mo ago
    And if they do it with their own money, it's their phone. Children prior to 18 are not subhuman. If you're old enough to buy your own phone, you're old enough to decide whether and how to use it.
    - Der_Einzige 11mo ago
      The idea of treating under 18s like they are human is extremely undesirable in the USA because it among other things opens up a lot of doctors to be held accountable for their participation in the mass mutilation of baby boys. It also holds a whole lot of physically abusive parents to a standard where their children could call CPS and get their parents in legal trouble for corporal punishment. Of course, these are indeed good things in worlds that don't endorse physical violence as the primary method to enforce control. This is why Finland his tail docking, ear cropping, animal crating, corporal punishment, circumcision, etc bans and why the US South is so ruthless.
      - LEDThereBeLight 11mo ago
        This is unhinged.
      - lurking_swe 11mo ago
        what did i just read
oytis 11mo ago
I would be pretty happy about social media being banned for everyone if not the immense possibilty for the government to abuse this law to disrupt undesired communication altogether.
- tuveson 11mo ago
  This website is social media.
  - oytis 11mo ago
    This is true, it's also not devoid of addictiveness :) But you know what I mean, right? The ones using intricate algorithms and tracking to keep you "engaged" and manipulate what you read and see
    - tuveson 11mo ago
      I know what you mean, but I think the issue is not social media, but rather big corporations being shitty. PepsiCo makes addictive beverages that cause people develop to diabetes and heart disease, but that doesn't mean beverages should be illegal. I think it would be better to regulate or ban the specifically harmful things, rather than a blanket ban on something that is actually useful. And like you alluded to, banning social media could easily lead to a general crackdown on freedom of expression, journalism, etc, now that it is the primary way people communicate with one another. I'll also add that I'm not specifically opposed to banning minors from using social media. It would probably also be better if it was illegal for children to buy their own soda tbh.
  - bluebarbet 11mo ago
    Technically true but I've found it to be less addictive than other text forums (like the R-site and Lemmy), let alone the algo-powered video-based abominations that normies are all hooked on. I'm thinking that it comes down to one thing in particular: the absence of response notifications. There's only so much addiction you can get out of a page of text without so much as a bell icon.
- 11mo ago
TacticalCoder 11mo ago
[dead]
isaacremuant 11mo ago
How about you parent your kid instead of trying to get the government to parent everyone else's? What the hell is you and everyone else's problem who want to get into other families' business. Disgusting intrusiveness and authoritianism.
- Aeolun 11mo ago
  It’s just easier to do some things if they’re prohibited by law. If you don’t want children to smoke, not selling them ciggarettes is a great first step.
  - raw_anon_1111 11mo ago
    All the statistics I’ve seen show that 25-30% of teenagers smoke weed. It’s but the governments job to make you out not to be the bad guy to your kids.
    - Aeolun 11mo ago
      It’s not their job, but if it needs to be done anyway I don’t mind them doing it for me. And smoking weed is a hell of a lot healthier than social media.
  - isaacremuant 11mo ago
    [flagged]
    - Aeolun 11mo ago
      You need to calm down. That’s a hell of a lot of personal attacks following a comment made in good faith.
      - isaacremuant 11mo ago
        [flagged]
    - 11mo ago
raw_anon_1111 11mo ago
Or parents could just take responsibility for their own children and not buy them a phone instead of outsourcing their parental responsibilities to the government.
- dr_kretyn 11mo ago
  Those very responsible would likely do that. But then you have a spectrum from "fully responsible but on occasions slip" to "not responsible at all". You can help some make the "good" decision and prevent others from making "bad" decisions. Hopefully those who grew up with healthier environments will have higher chances for becoming "fully responsible".
  - raw_anon_1111 11mo ago
    It amazes me after seeing the corruption of the current government that people want to give it more power over our lives.
    - dr_kretyn 11mo ago
      Seems we don't live in the same country and so we don't have the same "current government." Yes, if I were living in US, I wouldn't want to give the "current government" more power. Though, one might consider what is the cause and what is effect in the US political situation.
- hdgvhicv 11mo ago
  So no social life for kids then? It’s not 1995 any more. My 13 year old gets social contact doing things like playing Minecraft with people from school, organised via WhatsApp with group chats and then yelling about diamond swords and lava chickens or whatever. There’s then the simple reality that most schools require smartphones for things like homework. It’s set on devices you can only access via an app. Ok maybe you could run some form of android emulator and maybe that works and maybe they can’t do the homework on the bus on the way home and instead can just stare out of the window, but then the teachers tell them to do something in class. Then once they leave home at 18 and get introduced to something which has been banned yet is completely normal, they go overboard anyway.
all2 11mo ago
My wife and I have this discussion on a regular basis. We want kids, but we've both had to navigate technology usage without any guide, and I've personally experienced how ruinous a smartphone can be. We want to teach our children how to _responsibly_ use technology. We're still not sure what that looks like in detail, but the general agreement we've come to is something like 'no screens before age X'.
thw_9a83c 11mo ago
> As a parent who gave my oldest child a (very used) smartphone just before she turned 14, I would be in favor of making smartphones illegal under age 15. I see no logic in the above statement. You gave your kid a smartphone when she was 14. By today's standards, that's very late, and it's basically just one year before Denmark's proposed ban on social media. You can ban your child from having a smartphone for an arbitrary amount of time, but they are a future adult. Adults use smartphones. You can either prepare your child for the potential negatives of smartphone use, or they will learn that through their own experience later. There's no escaping smartphones and social networks. The only way to deal with this is to talk to your kids, warn them, and educate them. I gave my kids smartphones when they were 8 and 9 years old. Those phones were fully managed by me, and the only web pages they could access were their school pages and Wikipedia. Every year, I relaxed these restrictions and frequently talked to them about the dangers of social media. Now, they have almost fully unrestricted phones, and I don't think there's anything to worry about. The problem with social media for kids and teens is constant comparison. Any kind of comparison, but predominantly about visual appearance. Most people will never win this fight, and I believe it is a parent's role to explain this to their children. Banning smartphones or social media won't save anyone from facing the reality later on.
- martin82 11mo ago
  "adults use smartphones" Is this so? I think of it like the time when Hong Kong was flooded with Opium. "adults smoke opium" If you find that too crass, there are countless other ways to put it: "adults eat sugar" "adults watch TV" Just because everyone in the mainstream does something, DOES NOT mean that this is a good thing or a smart thing to do. In fact, we can easily observe that the few adults who are at the absolute top of their game, the most skilled, the most wealthy, the most powerful... well guess what? They DO NOT use smartphones. They don't tweet. They don't have profiles anywhere. Except for GPS directions, there is actually very very little actual need to use a smartphone. At work, you have a computer for access to Google. At home, you have a tablet or TV or books or a Kindle for media consumption. You can just swipe a credit card for payments. A smartphone is not at all needed to be a highly functioning adult. In fact - it actually prevents you from ever unlocking your fullest potential by removing any chance for your brain to ever catch a breath and just be bored for half an hour and hear your own thoughts.

OhioMan2943 11mo ago

Far worse.

arcfour 11mo ago

As a parent, you should be able to parent your child, rather than having the government arbitrarily and capriciously do so on your behalf, and for everyone else's kids, too. As someone who got my first BlackBerry at 11, which really spurred a lot of my later interests which are now part of my career or led to it indirectly, I am opposed to paternalistic authoritarian governments making choices for everyone. (Funny anecdote, but I didn't even figure out how to sign up for Facebook until I was 11-12, because I wouldn't lie about my age and it would tell me I was too young. Heh.)

mrtesthah 11mo ago
The problem is the kid feeling left out at school when they're the only one without a smartphone and can't participate in their friends' activities.
- arcfour 11mo ago
  ...and this needs to be solved with a law? Kids feeling left out over something well and truly inconsequentual?
  - foobarian 11mo ago
    Who needs laws! Let's also let them all smoke cigarettes too then while we're at it.
    - mothballed 11mo ago
      Lol you can order a cigar or pipe tobacco on the internet completely legally without any ID check. Most people don't know this. You can do it with wine, too, for the vast majority of the US. It's not really a problem.
      - cycomanic 11mo ago
        I suspect you need a credit card though? Can kids sign credit card contracts without parent consent in the US? Moreover just because that laws and regulations are applied inconsistently in the US (and we are talking about Denmark here), does not mean we should completely do away with them.
        mothballed 11mo ago
        Not sure if it's changed but I had a debit card and bank account from age 15 when I started working as a kid. I got it without even involving my parents, not sure if you can still do that now, it was before the KYC stuff ramped up to the nines.
  - angiolillo 11mo ago
    Not necessarily a law, but it requires some form of collective action. I highly recommend discussing a smartphone pact such as http://waituntil8th.org http://waituntil8th.org with fellow parents before anyone in their friend group gets a cell phone.
    - GaryBluto 11mo ago
      > Find out why smartphones need to be delayed in your home (emphasis mine) Do parents actually fall for this drivel?
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
dlisboa 11mo ago
Social media in the early 2000s is nothing like today.
- arcfour 11mo ago
  You're right, kids in the 2000s actually wanted to use social media. It's a dying industry—appropriate timing for a government to make a law to save kids from the evils of it.
  - zurfer 11mo ago
    The issue is rather the algorithmic feed optimized for grabbing our attention. It's definitely addictive and should be regulated like other drugs. Give people technology, but let's have an honest conversation about it finally. As a adult it's already hard to muster enough self control to not keep scrolling.
    - arcfour 11mo ago
      Okay, so explain this to your child, just like you tell them they shouldn't do drugs. Are there not people who are sober by choice? The only thing preventing you from going and smoking crack right now is most certainly not because it's illegal, but because you make a choice not to do so, knowing the negative effects it has on you. I don't scroll social media. When I was 14-17, sure. But then I lost interest, much like most of my peers did. (I do probably refresh HN more than I should though, but I think that's probably the least evil thing I could do compulsively...)
      - AOsborn 11mo ago
        The part you’re missing is that the decision to be online isn’t like choosing to do drugs. It’s closer to deciding to go to parties and socialise at all. Social media for teens is ubiquitous and where your peers connect. It’s being included in your social group, not opt-in thrill seeking. Most teens will have multiple accounts for various networks - private accounts for their friends, and then again for closer friends. Or they use apps like Discord that parents have no visibility into at all. There is a lot that most parents never see. For better or worse.
dmje 11mo ago
Yeh, no. Parents are doing what they can, but it inevitably comes down to “but my friend x has it so why can’t I have it” - so all and any help from government / schools is a good thing. This is so, so, so obviously a nasty, dangerous technology - young brains should absolutely not be exposed to it. In all honesty, neither should older ones, but that’s not what we’re considering here.
- arcfour 11mo ago
  "Because I'm your parent, and I said no." Do you buy your kids a toy every time you go to the store? Do you feed them candy for dinner?
  - davzie 11mo ago
    Neither of those examples result in social ostracism from peers.
    - arcfour 11mo ago
      I think you are massively overstating how important it is to the kids that they have a social media account. How can it hold that kids would be ignored in real life because they don't interact virtually?
      - josephg 11mo ago
        > How can it hold that kids would be ignored in real life because they don't interact virtually? Easy. If half the conversation happens online, and your kid wasn’t part of that, they’d constantly need to be “filled in” when they got to school. Imagine if your company used slack but you weren’t on it. You could still go to all the meetings, but there would have been conversations held and decisions made that you wouldn’t even know about. You would feel like you were on the out. Banning an individual kid from social media would be just the same.
        arcfour 11mo ago
thatguy0900 11mo ago
Comparing the internet we grew up with and the modern internet where a army of psychologists have been unleashed with the express intent to massively increase addiction to everything they touch is very foolish
- arcfour 11mo ago
  Demanding a law because you are unable to tell your kids "no" makes you the bigger fool.
  - mothballed 11mo ago
    The same people demanding the anti-smart phone laws will rat your ass out the second your kid is spotted walking alone, playing independently, etc. They want to put you in a catch-22 situation. The real problem here is way less people are parents or people that have no idea what parenting is like, so they don't understand the practicalities of raising children so they come up with the dumbest laws possible and then lord it over you with the full weigh of the state so they can pretend to be parents but with none of the responsibility and all of the smug moral superiority.
    - thatguy0900 11mo ago
      The people doing that are themselves victims of social media and news fear mongering and engagement maxxing
    - hobom 11mo ago
      Jonathan Haidt, the most prominent psychologist pushing for restrictions on social media use for children, is also the most prominent proponent of letting kids play and roam more freely. So no, those are not the same people.
  - thatguy0900 11mo ago
    This is not about telling kids no. This is about companies (and foreign hostile governments!) worth billions of dollars openly studying how best to prey on children's minds. There are things that are just poisonous to society as a concept.
beloch 11mo ago
First, if some parents let their kids use social media and some don't, all kids will eventually use it. You can't cut kids off from social spaces their peers are using and expect them to obey. Second, this move by Denmark reflects a failure to regulate what social media companies have been doing to all their users. e.g. What has Meta done to address their failures in Myanmar?[1] As little as was legally possible, and that was as close to nothing as makes no difference. More recently, Meta's own projections indicate 10% of their ad revenue comes from fraud[2]. The real proportion is almost certainly higher, but Meta refuses to take action. Any attempts to tax or regulate American social media companies has invited swift and merciless response from the U.S. government. To make matters worse, U.S. law makes it impossible for American companies to respect the privacy of consumers in non-U.S. markets[3]. Put it all together, and American social media is something that children need to be protected from, but the only way to protect them is to cut them off from it entirely. This is the direct result of companies like Meta refusing to respond to concerns in any way other than lobbying the U.S. government to bully other nations into accepting their products as is. Good on Denmark. I hope my own country follows suit. ------------ [1]https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-facebooks-systems-promoted-violence-against-rohingya-meta-owes-reparations-new-report/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb... [2]https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortune-deluge-fraudulent-ads-documents-show-2025-11-06/ https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu... [3]https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2025/07/22/microsoft-cant-keep-eu-data-safe-from-us-authorities/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2025/07/22/micro...
HeinzStuckeIt 11mo ago
Cultures around the world have barred children from certain social places until they go through a rite of passage that the whole society, not just the parents, recognize.
- arcfour 11mo ago
  Yes, cultures around the world have done this through parents parenting their child successfully, and not through arbitrary government overreach telling you how to parent.
  - HeinzStuckeIt 11mo ago
    Not really. The ideal you are describing, where there is no role for the community in regulating public spaces outside the household and determining when young people can enter them, strikes me as highly unusual historically and geographically. It’s an example of that streak of libertarianism that took off from early American internet culture and hardly exists outside internet pontificating.
cycomanic 11mo ago
As someone who sold their first joint at 11, which really spurred a lot of my later interests which are now part of my career or let to it indirectly, I am opposed to paternalistic authoritarian governments making choices for everyone. /s Absolute statements like yours rarely work, because the discussion is hardly ever about absolutes and more about where to draw the line.

SunshineTheCat 11mo ago

Crazy to think how less government would need to act like a mom if there were one or two parents out there who were familiar with the word "no."

mikkupikku 11mo ago
Let's do away with the laws requiring shops to check ID before selling cigarettes. After all, a parent can simply tell their child not to smoke cigarettes and that's clearly good enough, right? All in the name of less government, which is clearly the most important priority here.
- card_zero 11mo ago
  You make a persuasive case, but nicotine is genuinely addictive. Something to do with releasing stored glucose and substituting for food, and causing irritability on what I take to be a physiological level on withdrawal. Otherwise I'd agree.
  - benregenspan 11mo ago
    But in this context, is it so important to distinguish between whether something is physiologically addictive vs. just seriously habit-forming? Except for substances where withdrawal is genuinely life-threatening, the practical difference seems to be in degree, not kind. Nicotine withdrawal causes irritability, but (I know having experienced both) so can breaking a bad social media habit. (And it seems like there's a physiological basis to both cases, it's just that one involves endogenous chemicals and the other doesn't)
- ipaddr 11mo ago
  That system has massive holes. Using convenience store employees many recent immigrants to be the gatekeeper to cigarettes for your kids seems foolish. Who trusts that last line of defense? If a kid fails at once location another location will succeed and there are no punishment for attempting to purchase underage.
11mo ago

willio58 11mo ago

Agreed. Teachers are seeing the massive benefits from banning phones entirely during school hours. I think once we get data from bans for certain things like social media for kids, we'll all want to get on the wave.

colechristensen 11mo ago
This has to be done carefully because prohibition breeds desire and adults will absolutely try to force the attitude of 35 year olds onto 15 year olds forgetting a lot of life lessons have to be learned through experience and not just told. Everybody wants to get on the wave about how children these days are so much worse because of the new thing. And literally as long as we have recorded human writing we have adults complaining how the children are being ruined by the new culture or new item... and I mean we have these complaints from thousands of years ago. So be careful, you don't have to be completely wrong to still be overreaching.
- logifail 11mo ago
  > prohibition breeds desire Sure, but we (as societies) have always had to deal with this. Wherever you are in the world there are things that simply aren't allowed under a certain age, whether that's 15, 16, 18, 21 or whatever. My (just turned) 16 year old told me last that he didn't think it looked to be that hard to drive a car. Me: "Umm. You'll find out. When you get to it."
  - wizzwizz4 11mo ago
    It's not that hard to drive a car! Unfortunately, physics motivates us to have unreasonable expectations of our drivers, like "doesn't drive off the road at 100km/h ever", and "avoids all obstacles all of the time". That's the hard part.
  - tintor 11mo ago
    It doesn't look to be that hard to be a dentist. You drill a dark spot on tooth and put some resin inside to fill it up. /s

angiolillo 11mo ago

I'm not sure how I feel about making it illegal, but it does benefit from some sort of collective action. If none of your child's friends and classmates have cell phones yet, I'd strongly encourage establishing a smartphone pact with the other parents. Our community used http://waituntil8th.org http://waituntil8th.org pledges but even a shared spreadsheet would work.

colechristensen 11mo ago
One of the things that seems necessary is to make it illegal for a kid to use a phone in class before a certain age. If you don't have that you get the rules destroyed by demanding parents bullying administrators and school boards.
- angiolillo 11mo ago
  > the rules destroyed by demanding parents bullying administrators and school boards True, but that's why you don't do it alone. You need to talk with other parents and encourage them to talk to others until the majority of parents understand the risks and let the administration, school board, and teachers know that they have your support.
dyauspitr 11mo ago
All that local level stuff doesn’t work. As soon as a couple of kids have a smartphone, the online world becomes vastly more interesting than the day to day.
- angiolillo 11mo ago
  > All that local level stuff doesn’t work I can't speak to anyone else, but it seems to be working well enough in our town. The overwhelming majority of kids don't have cell phones until high school. That doesn't mean your kids won't beg you for a smartphone, it just means you can say "no" without socially isolating them. > As soon as a couple of kids have a smartphone The point is to engage in collective action early enough that you can prevent these situations in the first place. Once a critical mass of kids have smartphones and their socialization and coordination moves to online spaces it becomes intensely isolating to be the only kid in a friend group without a smartphone.

eikenberry 11mo ago

I did close to the same with my kids.. their PCs were in a common room, they got their first phone at 14 and it stayed at the downstairs charging station at night until 17. IMO it worked great and both our kids have a healthy relationship with their phones and tech in general.

teekert 11mo ago
I got my first smartphone at 23 (an HTC touch) and have an unhealthy relationship with my phone ;) You’re lucky. Some kids do prefer the real world.
- eikenberry 11mo ago
  When I say they have a "healthy relationship with tech" it doesn't mean they don't use tech, they both are heavily into tech, but don't let it impact their life adversely. It is more a balance that works for that individual than a preference for real vs. tech.

skapadia 11mo ago

1000% agree.

pembrook 11mo ago

Denmark's government has authoritarian aims and are one of the primary groups pushing chat control in the EU. I think you are falling for the "think of the children..." fallacy here. This is a stepping stone towards further control elsewhere, especially once a framework for enforcement is in place (which nobody actually thinks about when emotionally reacting to feel-good ideas like this). How easy would it be to expand ID based age enforcement to tracking ALL online activity and cracking down on "non-approved" speech? No thanks. I'll handle parenting myself. Also, if you don't care about the age number, and think social media is just objectively bad...why are you on this social media site? Isn't posting here the definition of hypocrisy...given you're supporting what you believe to be worse than cigarettes?

nullify88 11mo ago
I don't think HN is a social media site. The goals of a social media site is to keep you engaged for as long as possible with the assistance of various algorithms, dark patterns while your data is sold to businesses so they can have a slice of your attention pie via ads and supported content. I dont feel as if any of that applies here. In fact HN has gotten further from a social media site by not displaying comment points.
- pembrook 11mo ago
  You can argue this, but if you hand over this authority to government, it will not be up to you. Fundamentally this is an upvote driven social media platform no different from Reddit, which everyone agrees is social media. If you live in Denmark, get ready to tie your State ID to your HN profile to login and hope that you don't say anything that would make the wrong official (or your employer) upset with you. As we know from history, well-intentioned government laws have zero unintended consequences, always work perfectly every time, and are very easy to remove once they've been created...
  - Vriska1 11mo ago
    [dead]
  - 11mo ago

lukasm 11mo ago

I fully agree. There should be a complete ban on social media and similar addictive platforms for those under 16, and a nighttime ban (10 p.m.–7 a.m.) for users aged 16 to 18. We basically give cigarettes to children.

petre 11mo ago
Why not vice tax the operators? Easier than using age verification schemes and giving them even more data, chat control etc. I'm thinking tiktok, meta and x. Want to operate in Denmark? The license will cost $N/person/month where the amount of people equals the country's population. It's basically a viewer tax.
soulofmischief 11mo ago
It is absurd to suggest that children should not be allowed to socialize online. Have we completely forgotten the internet we grew up on? I would be dead if I hadn't been able to make friends online.
- WhyOhWhyQ 11mo ago
  The internet we grew up on does not exist.
  - ipaddr 11mo ago
    Kids socialize in video games now.
    - WhyOhWhyQ 11mo ago
      When I was a kid I joined a random BBCode forum with a group of 10 people who taught me how to program. There were challenges some passionate person set up and he would give tips to me and a few others for free. We hung out all day. That's gone.
      - soulofmischief 11mo ago

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

porsager 11mo ago

If you're a parent then act like one. You're perfectly able to enact that ban yourself - why do you need the governments help?

owisd 11mo ago
you can take a teen’s phone off them and they can just walk into a store and buy an inexpensive second hand handset and use the WiFi from a local cafe.
- JoshTriplett 11mo ago
  And if they do it with their own money, it's their phone. Children prior to 18 are not subhuman. If you're old enough to buy your own phone, you're old enough to decide whether and how to use it.
  - Der_Einzige 11mo ago
    The idea of treating under 18s like they are human is extremely undesirable in the USA because it among other things opens up a lot of doctors to be held accountable for their participation in the mass mutilation of baby boys. It also holds a whole lot of physically abusive parents to a standard where their children could call CPS and get their parents in legal trouble for corporal punishment. Of course, these are indeed good things in worlds that don't endorse physical violence as the primary method to enforce control. This is why Finland his tail docking, ear cropping, animal crating, corporal punishment, circumcision, etc bans and why the US South is so ruthless.
    - LEDThereBeLight 11mo ago
      This is unhinged.
    - lurking_swe 11mo ago
      what did i just read

oytis 11mo ago

I would be pretty happy about social media being banned for everyone if not the immense possibilty for the government to abuse this law to disrupt undesired communication altogether.

tuveson 11mo ago
This website is social media.
- oytis 11mo ago
  This is true, it's also not devoid of addictiveness :) But you know what I mean, right? The ones using intricate algorithms and tracking to keep you "engaged" and manipulate what you read and see
  - tuveson 11mo ago
    I know what you mean, but I think the issue is not social media, but rather big corporations being shitty. PepsiCo makes addictive beverages that cause people develop to diabetes and heart disease, but that doesn't mean beverages should be illegal. I think it would be better to regulate or ban the specifically harmful things, rather than a blanket ban on something that is actually useful. And like you alluded to, banning social media could easily lead to a general crackdown on freedom of expression, journalism, etc, now that it is the primary way people communicate with one another. I'll also add that I'm not specifically opposed to banning minors from using social media. It would probably also be better if it was illegal for children to buy their own soda tbh.
- bluebarbet 11mo ago
  Technically true but I've found it to be less addictive than other text forums (like the R-site and Lemmy), let alone the algo-powered video-based abominations that normies are all hooked on. I'm thinking that it comes down to one thing in particular: the absence of response notifications. There's only so much addiction you can get out of a page of text without so much as a bell icon.
11mo ago

TacticalCoder 11mo ago

[dead]

isaacremuant 11mo ago

How about you parent your kid instead of trying to get the government to parent everyone else's? What the hell is you and everyone else's problem who want to get into other families' business. Disgusting intrusiveness and authoritianism.

Aeolun 11mo ago
It’s just easier to do some things if they’re prohibited by law. If you don’t want children to smoke, not selling them ciggarettes is a great first step.
- raw_anon_1111 11mo ago
  All the statistics I’ve seen show that 25-30% of teenagers smoke weed. It’s but the governments job to make you out not to be the bad guy to your kids.
  - Aeolun 11mo ago
    It’s not their job, but if it needs to be done anyway I don’t mind them doing it for me. And smoking weed is a hell of a lot healthier than social media.
- isaacremuant 11mo ago
  [flagged]
  - Aeolun 11mo ago
    You need to calm down. That’s a hell of a lot of personal attacks following a comment made in good faith.
    - isaacremuant 11mo ago
      [flagged]
  - 11mo ago

raw_anon_1111 11mo ago

Or parents could just take responsibility for their own children and not buy them a phone instead of outsourcing their parental responsibilities to the government.

dr_kretyn 11mo ago
Those very responsible would likely do that. But then you have a spectrum from "fully responsible but on occasions slip" to "not responsible at all". You can help some make the "good" decision and prevent others from making "bad" decisions. Hopefully those who grew up with healthier environments will have higher chances for becoming "fully responsible".
- raw_anon_1111 11mo ago
  It amazes me after seeing the corruption of the current government that people want to give it more power over our lives.
  - dr_kretyn 11mo ago
    Seems we don't live in the same country and so we don't have the same "current government." Yes, if I were living in US, I wouldn't want to give the "current government" more power. Though, one might consider what is the cause and what is effect in the US political situation.
hdgvhicv 11mo ago
So no social life for kids then? It’s not 1995 any more. My 13 year old gets social contact doing things like playing Minecraft with people from school, organised via WhatsApp with group chats and then yelling about diamond swords and lava chickens or whatever. There’s then the simple reality that most schools require smartphones for things like homework. It’s set on devices you can only access via an app. Ok maybe you could run some form of android emulator and maybe that works and maybe they can’t do the homework on the bus on the way home and instead can just stare out of the window, but then the teachers tell them to do something in class. Then once they leave home at 18 and get introduced to something which has been banned yet is completely normal, they go overboard anyway.

all2 11mo ago

My wife and I have this discussion on a regular basis. We want kids, but we've both had to navigate technology usage without any guide, and I've personally experienced how ruinous a smartphone can be. We want to teach our children how to _responsibly_ use technology. We're still not sure what that looks like in detail, but the general agreement we've come to is something like 'no screens before age X'.

thw_9a83c 11mo ago

> As a parent who gave my oldest child a (very used) smartphone just before she turned 14, I would be in favor of making smartphones illegal under age 15. I see no logic in the above statement. You gave your kid a smartphone when she was 14. By today's standards, that's very late, and it's basically just one year before Denmark's proposed ban on social media. You can ban your child from having a smartphone for an arbitrary amount of time, but they are a future adult. Adults use smartphones. You can either prepare your child for the potential negatives of smartphone use, or they will learn that through their own experience later. There's no escaping smartphones and social networks. The only way to deal with this is to talk to your kids, warn them, and educate them. I gave my kids smartphones when they were 8 and 9 years old. Those phones were fully managed by me, and the only web pages they could access were their school pages and Wikipedia. Every year, I relaxed these restrictions and frequently talked to them about the dangers of social media. Now, they have almost fully unrestricted phones, and I don't think there's anything to worry about. The problem with social media for kids and teens is constant comparison. Any kind of comparison, but predominantly about visual appearance. Most people will never win this fight, and I believe it is a parent's role to explain this to their children. Banning smartphones or social media won't save anyone from facing the reality later on.

martin82 11mo ago
"adults use smartphones" Is this so? I think of it like the time when Hong Kong was flooded with Opium. "adults smoke opium" If you find that too crass, there are countless other ways to put it: "adults eat sugar" "adults watch TV" Just because everyone in the mainstream does something, DOES NOT mean that this is a good thing or a smart thing to do. In fact, we can easily observe that the few adults who are at the absolute top of their game, the most skilled, the most wealthy, the most powerful... well guess what? They DO NOT use smartphones. They don't tweet. They don't have profiles anywhere. Except for GPS directions, there is actually very very little actual need to use a smartphone. At work, you have a computer for access to Google. At home, you have a tablet or TV or books or a Kindle for media consumption. You can just swipe a credit card for payments. A smartphone is not at all needed to be a highly functioning adult. In fact - it actually prevents you from ever unlocking your fullest potential by removing any chance for your brain to ever catch a breath and just be bored for half an hour and hear your own thoughts.