Saving Childhood in Scotland

Policy Paper

Credits — Ellie Grifith, Matthew Dallas, Megan Davidson, Finn Laing

Overview

This paper was produced by four students who worked with Common Weal over the summer of 2025 and measures the public health emergency that has resulted from big businesses using online tools like algorithmic social media to engineer childhood for profitability.

We are living through a transformation as profound as the invention of the printing press or the railway. Digital technology has reshaped how children learn, communicate, form relationships, and develop a sense of self. Yet while childhood has changed fundamentally, the systems designed to protect and support children have not kept pace. The result is a quiet public health emergency of rising levels of anxiety, depression, self-harm, social withdrawal and behavioural difficulties among children and young adults over the past decade.

Scotland now has an opportunity to lead by treating children’s digital wellbeing as a matter of ethics, evidence, and collective responsibility. This paper sets out a practical framework and a set of concrete actions designed to do exactly that.

Key Points

1. By any standard this is a public health emergency which has resulted from big business engineering childhood for profitability.

2. Morally and legally (since Scotland implemented UN Conventions of the Rights of the Child in Scots law), this is the responsibility of government, not local authorities, not head teachers, not parents. The failure to act accordingly has been nothing short of political cowardice.

3. In fact it goes further and claims that the wellbeing of children is a collective social responsibility. Adults should have acted to protect children and we didn’t.

4. Our education system isn’t fit for an era of the emotional manipulation of children online and must rebalance and focus much more on emotional development and resilience.

5. Nationally we need a permanent, independent system of democratic oversight of the technologies used by children and it must adopt a precautionary principle when it comes to child wellbeing – and propose regulation accordingly.

6. But technology and childhood do not have to be in conflict; the problem is the nature of the technology. It is inexplicable that we have allowed systems that manipulate attention, emotion and behaviour during critical periods of neurological and psychological development driven by algorithms which use the same psychological mechanism as gambling – with no regulation.

7. From a wide literature review, the authors identified four principles that should underpin how we regulate technology for children:

   Radical Pragmatism:
   Virtue signalling is ineffective and token bans are not enough on their own. Action must be based on what has the biggest real world effect and that may not be the easy, big-ticket policy issues and certainly won’t be those alone.
   Capability Approach:
   Protecting children is necessary, but insufficient The goal is to support healthy development, not simply to prevent the worst outcomes. It isn’t about making the current environment less bad for children but making it positive and constructive.
   Algorithmic Ethics:
   If a system cannot be shown to be safe, it should not be deployed. With children there must be transparency in what they are being shown, how they are being directed – and why
   Precautionary Principle:
   Where evidence is incomplete but credible risk exists, the burden of proof lies with the developers, not children or parents.

8. This produced seven sets of recommendations, mostly for the Scottish Government but also for Westminster:

   1. Take responsibility
   Government should take responsibility and start living up to its legal obligations under UNCRC. And this should be done with urgency – no long consultations, no excuses about needing more research
   2. Create a regulator
   The Scottish Government should create a regulator capable of continually updating policy and regulations. This should consist of two advisory panels, one made up of child welfare experts and one of parents.
   3. Build a ‘curriculum for wellbeing’
   Nothing we can do will entirely ‘put the genie back in the bottle’. The environment for childhood has changed fundamentally and permanently. We must make children capable of navigating that environment in a way that protects and boosts their wellbeing. That means:

― Give emotional literacy and healthy social development as high a priority as academic achievement.
― Delay the start of formal schooling until the age of seven and replace the first two years with a play-based kindergarten stage
― Embed emotional and social learning and skill development across the curriculum, including conflict resolution, emotional regulation, empathy, negotiating skills, de-escalation techniques and consent.
― Embed mental health and social work services directly in schools, relieving teachers of inappropriate pastoral burdens.

4. Invest in real-world socialisation
The best solution to the problems of technology and children is to create many more opportunities for real world socialisation. This means supporting outdoor education, clubs, sports, spaces for unstructured play, hobbies and creative activities and for encouraging a culture that trusts children without permanent adult supervision.

5. Impose technology standards and guidance to protect children
The complexity of technology means that it is difficult for parents to assess what is best for their children and there is next to no official advice. We therefore need:

― Clear, unambiguous national guidance for parents and carers on issues like screen time, screens in bedrooms, appropriate ages for adoption of different technologies and so on.
― Mandatory bans on personal smartphone use during the school day in secondary schools, with devices secured in lockers and not integrated into learning. There is no place fort mobile phones in a primary school.
― A National Child-Safe Device Standard, ensuring all devices used by under-16s are configured to restrict algorithmic social media, advertising and harmful content by default. This is an involved process and so shouldn’t be left to parents alone. There should be a free-to-access service for all parents to configure phones according to best practice, either by requiring phone retailers to provide it or to embed it in schools or local authority premises.

6. Tame the algorithm and provide safe alternatives
The heart of the problem is not networking technology alone but the algorithm which decides what content children see. That is a ‘black box’ which can direct any content at children and we have no means of understanding what or why. So:

― The UK Government should in any case define the use of content shaped by algorithm as ‘publishing’ since that is what it is. This would mean any service using an algorithm to decide content should be legally responsible for those decisions like a publisher. This would not affect true social networking but would effectively ban the use of commercial algorithms which dictate content.
― The UK Government should act quickly to ban commercial social media for under 16-year-olds.
― But we want to reflect the benefits of genuine social networking so we propose the Scottish Government should explore creating a child-controlled social networking app that would create the benefits of connectivity without the harm of content manipulation by adults.

7. Take urgent remedial action for those already harmed
It is too late to wish technology hadn’t done harm so urgent remedial action needs to be taken for those already harmed. This means training for staff to identify pupils in distress, immediate mental health services for those affected, support and advice for parents of affected children and taking a zero tolerance to bullying approach.