By Charlotta Martinus
The growing calls to ban smartphones and social media for young people are understandable. Many parents, teachers and professionals are deeply concerned. We see rising anxiety, sleep deprivation, social comparison, cyberbullying and a generation increasingly drawn away from the physical world and into the digital one.
The impulse to protect young people comes from a good place.
But I find myself wondering whether we are repeating a familiar pattern: making decisions about young people without genuinely involving them in the conversation.
For decades, our systems have tended to oscillate between reward and punishment. We reward desired behaviours and punish unwanted ones. We impose restrictions, create rules and attempt to engineer outcomes. Yet many of the challenges facing young people today arise from the very fact that they often feel unheard, powerless and disconnected from the decisions that shape their lives.
When adults discuss social media bans, how often do we sit in a circle with young people and ask what role their phones are actually playing in their lives?
What are they seeking?
What needs are being met?
What are they escaping from?
What do they wish adults understood?
Without these conversations, there is a danger that we focus on the symptom rather than the cause.
A phone is not simply a device. For many young people it is connection, belonging, distraction, entertainment, identity, validation, comfort and escape. Remove the phone without understanding what it is providing, and another substitute may simply emerge.
This is not an argument against boundaries. Children and adolescents need boundaries. Every healthy society contains limits. The question is whether limits alone create wisdom.
The deeper challenge may not be how to stop young people using their phones. It may be how to help them no longer need them quite so much.
What if our focus shifted from control to capability?
What if we spent as much time teaching attention as we do regulating technology?
What if we helped young people understand what happens in their brains when they scroll endlessly? What if we taught them how algorithms are designed to capture attention? What if we gave them direct experiences of stillness, creativity, movement, nature, purpose and genuine human connection?
What if we helped them discover the difference between stimulation and fulfilment?
In yoga philosophy, freedom does not arise because somebody removes temptation. Freedom emerges when a person develops sufficient awareness to choose wisely in the presence of temptation.
This distinction matters.
A young person who has learned to regulate their nervous system, tolerate boredom, sit with uncomfortable emotions and find meaning beyond external validation is fundamentally different from a young person who simply has a phone confiscated.
One has developed capacity.
The other has experienced restriction.
The former is likely to retain those skills throughout life.
The latter may simply return to the same behaviour when the restriction is lifted.
Perhaps this is where we need to be having the conversation. Not “How do we ban social media?” but “How do we raise young people who are not dependent upon it for their sense of self-worth?”
This requires listening. It requires partnership. It requires creating spaces where young people are treated not as problems to be managed but as participants in shaping solutions.
The irony is that many of the qualities that protect against unhealthy technology use are the same qualities that protect mental health more broadly: self-awareness, emotional literacy, resilience, purpose, belonging and connection to the body.
These are not developed through screens.
Nor are they developed through prohibition alone.
They are developed through relationships, community, challenge, reflection and meaningful participation.
Perhaps the question is not whether social media is good or bad.
Perhaps the question is whether we are willing to help young people cultivate lives that feel rich enough, purposeful enough and connected enough that they choose, increasingly, to look up from the screen of their own accord.
That would be a far more powerful solution than any ban.
And unlike a ban, it would remain with them for life.