Dany Elachi recently drove to his local bike repair shop in Sydney, Australia, hoping for a quick fix. At Christmas, he and his wife, Cynthia, gave bikes to the three youngest of their five children—boys aged 9, 11, and 13—and they’ve had a hard time keeping them off them ever since.
The boys often head down to the local park with neighbors and friends to practice jumps and skids. Last month, Elachi’s 11-year-old borrowed his older brother’s sea green 26-inch bike and fell off, damaging the derailleur. By mid-April, Elachi had to haul all three bikes to the repair shop.
“Tell your boys if they want to skid, they should only do that on grass, otherwise the tires will wear out too fast. And these bikes aren’t really made for jumps,” the bike mechanic told Elachi before handing him the $150 bill.
The cost of the bikes and their repairs is a small price to pay as the Elachis seek to keep their kids active and outdoors instead of in their rooms glued to screens. They are one of a growing number of families in Australia that don’t allow their children to have smartphones or social media as the country implements the world’s first social media ban for anyone under 16.
It’s a decision they made based on experience: In 2020, the Elachis gave their eldest daughter, Aalia, then 10 years old, a smartphone, since every other student in her class had one. It didn’t take long for them to see its negative effects. She stopped reading books, even though she’d been an avid reader. She played less with her siblings. Her parents had to frequently urge her to leave her room and help with chores.
“It overwhelmed and overtook her childhood,” Elachi said. Within a few months, the phone malfunctioned and they decided to not replace it.
But that meant she was left out of plans, conversations, and social connections with her smartphone-using classmates. When the Elachis spoke with other parents at their Catholic school, they discovered that they weren’t alone in their concerns. “Everybody felt like they had to give their kids a phone, but they really didn’t want to,” he said.
That’s when the Elachis formed an alliance with 45 families at their school—representing 10 percent of the student population—who all agreed not give their children smartphones. Aalia was no longer the odd one out, and the Elachis weren’t the only “mean parents” at the school.
As news of their alliance spread to parents at other schools, Elachi and his wife founded the Heads Up Alliance later that year. In 2022 and 2023, the organization successfully lobbied to make Sydney Catholic schools and New South Wales public schools phone free from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Elachi’s group also successfully advocated for a nationwide ban on social media for anyone under age 16. That ban went into effect on December 10, just two weeks before the Elachi boys got their new bikes for Christmas. Facebook, Instagram, Kick, Reddit, Snapchat, Threads, TikTok, Twitch, X, and YouTube are included in the new restrictions, and the eSafety Commissioner’s office said it may include more.
Australia’s ban comes as governments around the world are reckoning with the consequences of social media use on children and teens. In the US last month, a California jury found Meta and Google, which owns YouTube, responsible for a young user’s anxiety and depression due to addictive design features, such as infinite scroll and algorithm-based recommendations. The landmark decision set a precedent that social media can cause personal injury, which will likely factor into many similar cases against the tech giants.
Meanwhile in March, Indonesia became the second country to ban social media for those under 16. Countries like France, Spain, Malaysia, and Denmark are considering similar policies in hopes to protect children from their potential harm.
Critics are calling the Australia ban a failure as young people find workarounds and social media companies haven’t kicked all users under 16 off their platforms. Regulators have said they are investigating whether some of the biggest platforms are fully complying with the law. Tech companies, meanwhile, have indicated it’s challenging to prevent minors from bypassing age-verification checks.
Despite these challenges, Elachi and other Australian parents are grateful that its passage has helped publicize the dangers of social media and normalize a childhood that doesn’t revolve around screens.
The Popping family in Geelong, a port city southwest of Melbourne, agrees. When Darci Popping was in third grade, her mother Katherine and other parents at her school made an informal alliance to not give their children phones. But one by one, each parent gave in, until at age 13, Darci said she was the only one in her class without a smartphone. She could only email classmates on her iPad, which her parents allowed as they reasoned it was too big and clunky to enable constant access.
The Poppings let their children have an iPad at age 13 and a phone at age 15. Before the ban, Katherine Popping said her children felt like they were missing out on not being on social media, which they were toying with allowing at age 16. Now that the ban is in effect, it’s more socially acceptable to not have social media, “and it’s not us that are being the rule makers,” she said.
Darci said that in the past she knew social media was addictive and harmful but still felt annoyed at not having something others had. Now that she’s 16 and has a smartphone, she mainly uses it to take photos and use WhatsApp, which is unaffected by the social media ban.
Darci and her 14-year-old brother Fletcher say only one person in their youth group of two dozen kids uses social media, so it’s not a topic leaders go into much detail about. Fletcher remembers a series on “big topics” at a meeting that touched on social media and body image when they discussed Philippians 4:8: “Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.”
Fletcher said a friend from youth group doesn’t want anything to do with smartphones as he worries that cookies and algorithms will know too much about him and invade his privacy.
Personally, Fletcher is looking forward to getting his first smartphone next year since his friends all have them and communicate on apps that he doesn’t have on his iPad. Plus, he says, he’ll have an actual phone number and data, allowing him to call his parents to pick him up from theater practice without walking to the train station to use free public Wi-Fi.
At their Christian school, Covenant College, they’ve heard administrators give strong injunctions to stay away from social media, even while admitting it’s a decision between parents and their children. But Darci says her friends’ parents don’t always explain the reasoning behind their rules, so kids often rebel.
Just before the social media ban went into effect, Darci and Fletcher said they heard of kids creating new accounts with fake birthdays. Many were concerned about losing access to constant music on YouTube.
“They were concerned that without having something to do, they’d get really bored,” Darci said. “They’re like, ‘How am I supposed to keep my 300-day streak if I can’t go on social media?’”
Since the ban, Fletcher says he knows of people who asked older siblings to create an account for them, since some platforms now incorporate biometric scans to ensure the person in front of the camera is over 16.
Some see these biometric scans as a problem. Reuben Kirkham, one of the directors of Australia’s Free Speech Union, says they discriminate against Indigenous people and people with disabilities, facial disfigurements, or mobility issues whose faces or physical abilities make matching a profile impossible.
The union sees the ban as an unnecessary intrusion into people’s privacy and believes it will have a chilling effect on anonymous speech. “If everyone is subject to digital ID in the form of age verification,” Kirkham said, “the social media platforms won’t be anonymous. It will be easier to be sued for defamation.”
Kirkham says there are less invasive and more effective ways to protect children from social media harms, like employing artificial intelligence to scan and block problematic images or videos on devices.
While the ban requires platforms to close the accounts of underage users, none of the families CT spoke with knew anyone who had been kicked off a social media platform. In fact, of 900 parents surveyed, 70 percent said their children, who are between 8 and 15, were still accessing social media.
Elachi believes that while the law hasn’t changed the big tech companies’ practices, its presence still has a positive effect. Parents with younger children are now more confident in delaying their children’s entrance into the world of scrolling, posting curated photos, and staring at their screens.
“Those children are in a different boat compared to kids who are currently 13 or 14, who already had social media for a few years and then felt like something was being taken away from them,” he said.
Elachi says the law is pro-parent, allowing parents to “reclaim their children, to build a relationship with them that perhaps has been weakening over the last 10 or 15 years.”
A Roman Catholic, Elachi believes the church should do more to warn its congregants of how smartphones distract from more important things. “Very few children are waking up in the morning and thanking their Creator for a new day,” he said. “Very few adults are doing that anymore.” Instead, they reach for the phone to see what messages they missed overnight. “Our children’s spiritual lives are being impacted.”
Elachi isn’t anti-technology. At times he allows his kids to use the computer or play video games, but that time is limited. He can easily tell them that their screen time is up and encourage them to go outside and ride their bikes or read a book. Teachers have noticed the difference in his children and those of the other parents in the alliance, mentioning they are better able to hold a conversation.
Elachi encourages parents to heed their instincts while taking the advice of experts—who failed to admit social media was as addictive as a drug—with a grain of salt.
“In our children’s cases, if they’re addicted, the price they pay is with their entire childhood,” Elachi said as he drove home with three working bikes. “That comes once. And once it’s gone, they’re never getting another chance. This law helps parents stick to their own convictions.”
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