The Danish Children and Youth Well-Being Commission who recently published their report finds that sleep, physical activity, and physical communities are crucial for the well-being of children and young people, but that the interests of a very powerful tech industry run completely opposite to these basic childhood pillars. There is a need to confront big tech’s colonization of childhood.
It’s been going on for over a decade. Big tech has nurtured their interests in an already staggering economic bottom line at the expense of very basic parameters for the well-being of children and young people. Their business models have challenged very fundamental protective factors for the well-being og children and youth for a number of years. Therefore, if we are to ensure play, presence, the ability to concentrate, a good night’s sleep, and much more, we must form a common counter-pressure to the retention mechanisms of the tech giants.
This is one of the overall conclusions of the Danish (children and youth) Well-Being Commission. A commission that I myself have had the privilege of being a part of. After more than 1.5 years of rather intense work, we completed our work and launched a series of recommendations in March.
Here, we call for a general precautionary principle and stronger protection of children and young people in the digital environment. We also point to specific recommendations that can create a better balance between children and young people’s digital and analogue lives. This requires, among other things, that the time spent behind a smartpone screen, which is very much algorithmically controlled, is reduced and replaced with activities and challenges in the physical environment.
Addressing a Complex Collective Action Problem
While it is primarily the Commission’s recommendations regarding screens in schools that have received attention in the Danish media, the overall list of recommendations is long.
They all take as their starting point the fact that we are currently in a form of collective action problem. This type of problem is characterised by the fact that a group would be better off if everyone in the group took a certain action, but that the individual individuals in the group do not act unless the others do the same based on the possibility that the personal costs of acting outweigh the benefits.
American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt illustrates this with an experiment from the University of Chicago, where more than 1,000 university students were asked how much they would be paid to deactivate their Instagram or TikTok accounts for four weeks. On average, the students said $50. When they were then told that most of their peers would also be paid to deactivate, their willingness to stay on the platforms decreased – many were even willing to pay to have the platforms deactivated. This showed that most students prefer a world without social media, but feel trapped by the collective action of others who use them.
Therefore, it is up to us adults around children to create a common playing field with common norms.
EVERYONE has a Role to Play
Here, it is an explicit point that ALL adults around children have a role to play: Elected politicians, parents, teachers, educators, role models, and government officials.
For example, we call for the Danish government to push for stricter EU rules, where digital services must be able to document that they are age-appropriate and free of addictive design. In addition, age verification should be mandatory. Despite the 13-year age limit on many platforms, 94% of children have a profile before their 13th birthday.
But we cannot expect quick solutions, and as a society we collectively call for children to postpone their smartphone debut until the age of 13. A simple mobile phone without browser access and apps can provide the opportunity for communication, but at the same time provide space for play, movement, and physical communities – and protect children from commercial interests and harmful content.
At the same time, we must strengthen digital literacy and parents and the rest of society must lead the way as good role models. Because all of this is fundamentally about creating a life that is good for everyone – and we cannot expect children and young people to make good digital choices if we do not do it ourselves.
We also recommend that disruptive commercial devices such as smartphones and smartwatches are completely packed away during school hours – this is both a way to address cognitive disruptions and the pervasive commercialization to which screen-based smart devices are exposed.
To restore a balanced childhood, we must combine political regulation with very concrete common norms for a healthy and active life. This requires joint action from everyone.
Especially now that history is repeating itself through chatbots, which are going crazy with even wilder retention mechanisms in the form of, for example, human-like design.
Picture by Lukas from Pexel.
