Monday 26/05/2025 JSN: A Call to Urgently Address the Negative Impact of Screen Use and Social Media on Children and Adolescents
To: The Dutch Government, in particular the Ministers and State Secretaries of Health, Welfare and Sport, Education, Culture and Science, Justice and Security (especially Youth Policy and Media), Youth, Prevention and Sport, and Digitalization and Kingdom Relations
Date: 26 May 2025
Dear Ministers and State Secretaries,
We, a group of over 1,400 doctors, scientists, and field experts from various disciplines, support the appeal made by parents of more than 30,000 children in the Netherlands. We urgently call for action against the growing health and wellbeing crisis caused by excessive and age-inappropriate screen and social media use among children and adolescents.
Together with parents, we are concerned about:
- The normalization of giving smartphones to children at increasingly younger ages.
- The impact on children’s health and development caused by 24/7 internet access from their pockets.
- The applications inherently tied to smartphones—especially those that profit from capturing and selling children’s attention.
- The time spent on these devices, often at the cost of activities that contribute to healthy development.
- The safety of children, as most commonly used apps cannot guarantee a safe and appropriate environment for minors.
- The long-term consequences of these factors on the health and development of children.
Given the intensive use of smartphones and social media by young people, the proven physical health effects, indications of mental harm, and the absence of structurally safe digital environments, it is time to reassess the societal norms. The current normalization of giving children personal smartphones and early access to social media must be reconsidered.
In the interest of children’s health and optimal development, we support the proposal to establish a minimum age of 14 for giving children their own smartphone, and 16 for access to social media.
JSN
Related to this article: Report of danger of early use of smartphones
Source: smartphonefreechildhood
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