Kids and social media, a parent's guide

The research is calmer than the headlines, and the best protection isn't a ban. Here's what the studies actually show, a quick guide to the apps your kids will ask for, and the principle that keeps them safer than any age limit.

The short version

The short version

Social media's effects are real, but they're biggest where use crowds out sleep and friendships, and for girls in their early teens. The age limit of 13 is a floor, not a recommendation. And what matters more than any single app is whether your child dares to show you what goes on in there.

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What the research actually shows

Few corners of the kids-and-technology field have been studied harder, and few divide the researchers more. Two things are true at once: heavy social media use really is linked to poorer mental health in teenagers, and that link is well documented. It's also smaller, and far more conditional, than the headlines let on. The big reviews of the field land strikingly close to one another: the effects are real, small on average and very unevenly spread.

Unevenly spread means some kids shrug it all off while others get hurt. The signal is clearest in three places: teenagers on social media more than three hours a day, girls in their early teens, and use that eats into sleep. The screen itself rarely does the damage. What hurts is the healthy stuff it replaces, and the kind of content it serves up.

And this isn't happening somewhere far away. In Norway, half of all 9 and 10-year-olds are on social media, age limit or no age limit. The decision lands earlier than most of us had planned.

So how do you know if your child is one of the ones being hurt? Researchers watch for the same signs you can watch for at home:

• Sleep loses. Bedtime keeps slipping, or the phone starts sleeping in the bed.
• The mood after is worse than the mood before. Not one rough evening, a pattern.
• Friends and hobbies that used to matter quietly fall away.
• The use goes underground, and questions about it get met with a wall.

Any one of these can be a perfectly normal week in a child's life. Several at once, for weeks on end, means it's time to sit down and adjust things together.

The apps they'll ask for, one by one

The age limits below are the platforms' own. The 13-year limit comes from American privacy law, not developmental psychology. It's a floor, not a recommendation.

These are the apps that come up most. Tap a name for a small card with the essentials and the way on to each guide.

Snapchat (age 13). Disappearing messages, location sharing, the same kind of feed as Instagram/TikTok, plus streaks that reward showing up every day. For the classic opener, I've written a shorter answer of its own: My child wants Snapchat because “everyone else has it”. What do I do?

Instagram (age 13). The app where comparison lives: perfect bodies, perfect lives and a like count keeping score of both. This is where the research on girls in their early teens points most clearly. A private account and hidden likes help, but the feed underneath is the same.

TikTok (age 13). The sharpest recommendation algorithm of the lot: it works out in record time what holds your child's gaze and serves up more of it. Your child's time is the business model. There's a time limit and a restricted mode in the settings, worth setting up together. Or do what I do, having decided the downsides outweigh the upsides in an app that was not built for our kids: “TikTok is a decision you can make for yourself when you're grown up.”

Roblox (no real lower age limit). Looks like a game, behaves like a social network: chat with strangers, its own currency and a steady drip of pressure to spend. The parental controls have got genuinely good, with content levels, chat settings and spending caps, but somebody has to actually turn them on. Sit down with your child and agree which games are OK, ideally with a rule that they only play with friends, never alone.

WhatsApp (13 in Europe). The limit dropped from 16 to 13 in 2024. The app itself is harmless enough; the drama lives in the group chats. A class group is the schoolyard after hours, complete with exclusion and screenshots that travel. And WhatsApp has grown a feed of sorts: the Updates tab carries channels and statuses, which is to say content to get stuck in.

YouTube (age 13, YouTube Kids for the youngest). The social side is the comment sections and the Shorts stream, built to hold attention exactly the way the feeds in TikTok and its cousins do. Shorts in particular is easy to get hooked on, and it's a world away from a 5 to 15 minute video about something your child actually wants to learn.

Pinterest (age 13). Didn't see that one coming, did you? It looks like a pinboard of recipes and bedroom inspiration, and it has private messaging. More on that in a moment.

You'll find the apps that usually come up, with settings and conversation tips for each, in the App Guide.

The settings that take back the feed

Instagram and TikTok both let you shape what the feed serves. The tool below walks through the settings, and it works well as something to do together.

Social media turns up where you least expect it

For us it was Pinterest. The app we'd filed under harmless inspiration turned out to have private messaging, and our daughter suddenly found herself in intense conversations with a stranger who was struggling with suicidal thoughts. She carried it alone for a while, until we stumbled on it during a review of the apps she was using. The most important thing afterwards wasn't deleting the app. It was that she learned, first-hand, that she could talk to us about it calmly without getting told off.

The lesson isn't “beware of Pinterest”. The lesson is that the social layer hides everywhere: in game chats, in comment sections, in voice chat in Fortnite and on Discord, where the gaming talk tends to move in from about age ten. What you need to take a view on, and keep an eye on, isn't the app's category. It's the messaging.

If your child, or someone they know, is struggling with dark thoughts: in Norway, Mental Helse runs a 24-hour helpline on 116 123, and Kors på halsen (the Red Cross) is there for children and teenagers on 800 333 21.

The open door

New apps and features arrive faster than any parent can track, and control without trust teaches a child exactly one skill: hiding better. What matters most is talking regularly, and your child knowing in their bones that they can show you anything at all without a telling-off and without losing the phone.

An open door protects more than any age limit ever will. You can put it like this:

So my single biggest recommendation is a trade: your child gets the apps you've said yes to, and in return the door stays open and you always get to see. When something strange surfaces, and it will, your job is to breathe, thank them for trusting you and give a reason they can understand whenever the answer is no. And this isn't one conversation. It's the same calm conversation, many times over, until it sticks. The words need backup too: real time limits, set in the system rather than left to good faith.

Talking with your kids

“You're going to see things online that are weird, gross or scary. That's not your fault, and you're not in trouble. You're also going to say and do silly things you'll regret afterwards. If you show me, I promise two things: I won't get angry, and you won't lose your phone. I just want to know, so you're not carrying it alone, and so I can help.”

Closing thoughts

The choice is rarely between a safe app and a dangerous one. Everything above can be perfectly fine for a fourteen-year-old who sleeps well and has an open door at home, and everything above can go badly wrong for an eleven-year-old facing it alone. How the app arrives matters more than when: together, with the settings done properly, and with a standing agreement that the door is open and nothing is secret. If you can't show me, you shouldn't have done it or written it.

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