The biggest news of 2025 regarding kids’ online safety was Australia’s new social media age-limit law, which set the minimum age for opening or maintaining a social media account to 16. The second-biggest news? As Australia’s law went into effect, there was a global chorus of parents, journalists, and political leaders who stood up, applauded the bold move, and asked, “Can we do that, too?”
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Bloomberg, in an article titled “TikTok, Instagram Ban for Australian Kids Heralds Global Curbs,” provides a list of countries in which legislation has been, or soon will be, introduced:
The idea is spreading, and each nation considering such a policy should ask two important questions:
Should the age be 16, as in Australia, or should it be 15, as might become the case in France? Should there be an option for parents to give consent for adolescents below that age?
The correct answers: 16, and no.
Here’s why:
We must protect puberty, and 15 is still puberty
I devoted an entire chapter of The Anxious Generation to puberty because it is such a crucial period of brain re-wiring and identity formation. Developmental psychologists see puberty as a “sensitive period” in which the brain is especially “plastic” or malleable based on incoming experience. The brain is changing over from the child form to the adult form, and those changes are guided by whatever a child does repeatedly. Neurons that fire together wire together, as brain researchers say.
The average adolescent in the U.S. now spends around five hours a day using social media. Their brains will enhance whichever neurons and circuits are activated repeatedly, at the expense of neurons and circuits that are underused. This brain sculpting happens throughout childhood, and continues on in the pre-frontal cortex until around age 25. But in the earlier part of adolescence — specifically puberty — the sculpting is more intense, and the changes are more likely to be permanent.
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