Science, Innovation and Technology Committee
Oral evidence: Neuroscience and digital childhoods, HC 57
Wednesday 10 June 2026
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 10 June 2026.
Members present: Kit Malthouse (Chair); Emily Darlington; Dr Allison Gardner; Freddie van Mierlo; Martin Wrigley.
Questions 1-38
Witnesses
I: Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, Professor of Psychology, University of Cambridge, Dr Dusana Dorjee, Senior Lecturer Psychology in Education, University of York and Professor Denis Mareschal, Professor of Psychology, Birkbeck, University of London.
Written evidence from witnesses:
Witnesses: Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, Dr Dusana Dorjee and Professor Denis Mareschal.
Q1 Chair: Welcome to this sitting of the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee, which is looking into the neuroscience of child brain development. We are very pleased to welcome our guests this morning. Obviously, we have had apologies: I am chairing this morning because our Chair is overseas on a visit. I hope to do a passable job in her absence.
As I say, this is part of our inquiry into the neuroscience and development of children’s and adolescents’ brains. We are pleased, following our roundtable, to welcome our esteemed guests this morning. We all know Professor Blakemore well; I think this is our third encounter—I am sorry that I missed the roundtable, but it is good to see you again. We also have Professor Denis Mareschal from Birkbeck and Dr Dusana Dorjee, who is joining us online from York. Welcome to you all.
First, would each of you explain the particular area of science you are expert in, so that we have a sense of how best to direct our questions? Professor Blakemore, perhaps you could kick us off.
Professor Blakemore: I am Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, a professor of psychology at the University of Cambridge. For the last 23 years, first at UCL and now at Cambridge, I have led the developmental cognitive neuroscience research group. Our research focuses on the development of the brain and the mind and social behaviour in adolescence.
Chair: So you are particularly focused on adolescence.
Professor Blakemore: Yes, and we define adolescence as the period of life between 10 and 24—a very extended period of development.
Chair: Very good. Dr Dorjee, could you do the same intro?
Dr Dorjee: I am a senior lecturer in psychology in education at the University of York. My research focuses on the processes in the mind and brain that underpin mental health and wellbeing. I have recently formulated a new framework, called the neurodevelopmental theory of mental health and wellbeing capacities, explaining how the processes in the mind and brain that underpin mental health and wellbeing develop, with particular focus on self-regulation capacity and the self-world capacity.
My research is translational, which means that I translate the new understanding of these processes into policy and school curricula. I have recently formulated a meta-framework for designing school mental health and wellbeing curricula. This meta-framework has formed the basis for a new curriculum for mental health and wellbeing in primary schools, which is currently being introduced in English schools.
Chair: Very good. To clarify, are you particularly focused on younger children, adolescents or the whole age range?
Dr Dorjee: My primary focus is on children of primary school age.
Chair: Thank you. Professor Mareschal?
Professor Mareschal: I am Professor Denis Mareschal, a professor at Birkbeck, and the director of the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development. As it says on the tin, we study the relationship between brain development and thinking, reasoning and social cognition in children and early infancy.
To give you a bit of context, I actually started out studying physics, but very quickly realised that children were far more interesting than rocks. I moved into studying children, but I brought from physics a focus on the mechanisms of change—the mechanisms of learning. As a consequence, I have been involved in primary school teaching. I am the co-director of the Centre for Educational Neuroscience, which is a Birkbeck-UCL centre that tries to take lessons from cognitive neuroscience and translate them into education practice. I think I am pretty rare in being one of the few high-level academics who also does a day a week in primary school—teaching maths in inner-city London—so I know what the coalface is like as well.
Q2 Chair: On that note, professor, can I ask you to roll into the first question from me? Could you summarise to us the key brain processes that you think we should be concerned with? Perhaps our other two experts could then do the same thing, in relation to their aspects of research. What we are trying to focus on is the science of brain impact and development, before we move on to the external stimuli in particular. Understanding those key processes will be important for us.
Professor Mareschal: I can definitely do that, but I want to follow up on what I was saying before, because I forgot to say that I probably focus most on the under-threes.
Chair: Perfect—we have under-threes, primary school and adolescents.
Professor Mareschal: One of the key things to understand about the brain is that it is not a unified organ; it is a set of different functional systems that have co-evolved together to help us survive. As a consequence, they work together, but they compete with each other for control of our behaviour. That is critical, because if that balance of competition gets unregulated or deregulated, the behaviour may not be as we might expect.
The large architecture of the brain—where the different parts go—is essentially genetically predetermined: everyone has certain lobes in the same place if they develop appropriately. However, the wiring between those parts and within those parts is environmentally driven. Some of the wiring—the long cables that connect, say, the amygdala, or emotional parts, with the cortical parts, or higher knowledge parts—is done through experience. Most important, it drives connections within brain parts. For example, the connections in the cortex—the outer part and the latest to have evolved, in which a lot of our sensory motor skills and deeper reasoning skills are situated—are very much driven by our experiences we.
This plasticity is a strength of the human brain. It is why we are so successful as a species, as it means that we can adapt to changing environments. You do not know when you are born what the environment will be like, which means that development can be hijacked by inappropriate environments—for example, the brains of children who grow up in very restrained orphanages without any enrichment will develop to reflect that environment. But again, in some ways, that is a positive sign of how the brain works: it adapts to what is available to it.
In terms of adaptation and plasticity, we have found that usually, in all the different parts of the brain sphere at different times, a burst of connections is made; there is a peak that then gets pruned off later. For example, in the back of the brain—the visual cortex—we get a peak of connections at around two years of age, to allow that part of the brain to embed all the visual information from the world. Then, the connections that are not being used are pruned away to save energy, because having all those connections is not very useful. That process happens at different ages in different parts of the brain.
All the parts of the brain, including the cortex—the higher level—are functional, even in newborns. However, the cortex of a newborn is immature—the connections are not made, and it does not work in the same way as an adult’s does—so there is a lot of scope for change to happen in the first few years of your life. In the first six weeks to three months, behaviour in particular is often controlled by reflex-type systems in subcortical parts of the brain, which are older, but after that, the volitional, what we call endogenous, control of behaviour kicks into place a lot more. I say, “kicks into place”, but these are always gradual transitions; there is not a moment when—boom—we have changed the way the brain works, and it varies a little from individual to individual.
Two more things are critical in brain development. One is myelination, which is the covering of the neurons by a fatty sheath that is a bit like the plastic covering on electrical wires. That develops from the back of the brain to the front of the brain, from birth to early adulthood. Myelination improves the conductance, speed and effectiveness of processing neurons. That means that younger brain that are not myelinated might do similar things to adult brains, but more slowly and while maybe losing a bit of information. That is a broad overview of what heightens early on.
Q3 Chair: Thank you. Dr Dorjee, do you have anything to add to that fascinating answer?
Dr Dorjee: Yes: I would like to describe the development of the capacities that I mentioned in childhood. That can be instrumental for us when thinking about the impact of devices on the brain, particularly in this age group.
In the framework, I talked particularly about two capacities. The first is self-regulation capacity. As you may know, self-regulation is a major predictor of children’s outcomes across adolescence, as well as in adulthood. Self-regulation is children’s ability to manage their thoughts, emotions and behaviours in adaptive ways in alignment with their goals. It has been shown that this capacity predicts children’s mental health and wellbeing through life, how much they will earn when they are adults, their academic success and even crime levels in adulthood, so it is a central predictor of lifelong outcomes. There is a lot of strong research showing that self-regulation in childhood predicts these lifelong trajectories for children, so there is good reason to focus on fostering self-regulation in childhood.
From the neural perspective, self-regulation is underpinned by several brain networks; three in particular work together and develop during childhood and beyond. First there is the salience network, which enables us to notice what is happening in our mind. It helps us notice our behaviour and regulate it based on that. Next, there is the executive network, which directs our attention and helps us to decide, problem solve and choose the right emotion regulation strategies and helps us to sustain our attention. The third network, the default mode network, is activated when we are distracted, daydream and are not on task. Those three networks work together: the salience network acts as a switch so that when we notice that we are not on task and are distracted it can signal to the executive network that it needs to take over and shift our attention to what we need to focus on in the moment.
There is a lot of research showing that how these networks develop and work together determines mental health and wellbeing across age groups. These networks gradually separate during childhood and work more efficiently. When they cluster together more, that can predict later mental health difficulties. The thing to remember about childhood is that most mental health problems manifesting in adolescence have their roots in imbalances in different networks in childhood or early childhood. There are so-called programming and incubation effects, where adverse events and imbalances during childhood sometimes manifest 10 or more years afterwards in, for example, anxiety and depression in adolescence. The development of those networks in childhood is crucial, and devices may have an impact on them.
However, there are two other networks that work together with what we call the HPA axis. That is a network of brain areas and the adrenal cortex which releases stress hormones in response to what we experience—and so it is shaped by experience. When children experience imbalances in the function of this stress response and this axis, it can impact on the networks that I have mentioned. It can even damage some parts of the brain that are involved in cognitive control—the executive aspects of their functioning. They also work together with the reward network. When we talk about digital devices, there is a lot of talk about the reward network, but again, we need to remember that this network works together with those other networks and to some extent is impacted by them, and that determines whether children go for immediate gratification or are able to delay their action and focus on longer-term goals.
There is a second capacity called the self-world capacity, which I will focus on much less. That capacity is about relational wellbeing and is underpinned by mentalising brain, empathy and prosocial networks. It is concerned with connections and the development of children’s purpose in life and their social functioning and social competencies. It also develops quickly during childhood.
Q4 Chair: Professor Blakemore, I am certainly getting the impression that the brain is a frighteningly delicate organ, the development of which is obviously dependent on lots of factors. Are there particular chemicals, hormones or processes that we should be particularly focused on?
Professor Blakemore: Some of them have been mentioned. I focus on adolescent brain development and when I speak about brain development, I am thinking about the period of life between 10 and 24 years of age in which the brain continues to develop. It does not just stop in childhood. As Denis mentioned, the brain is very plastic and that is one of the mechanisms that are important to focus on. That heightened plasticity is also maintained in adolescence. What that means—the crucial consequence of that—is that it is not just a person’s genes that determine how their brain develops; their environment and their environmental experiences also shape and mould the ways that their brain develops. Of course, environment includes everything, including social media.
This has been mentioned, but the other thing to note in relation to adolescence and in the context of social media is that different brain regions develop at different rates. For example, the limbic system, which is involved in things like emotion processing and reward processing, develops relatively early and is hypersensitive to rewarding and exciting stimuli in adolescence. In contrast, the pre-frontal cortex—an area that has already been mentioned—and other regions that are involved in cognitive processing, such as self-control, undergo really protracted development right throughout adolescence into the 20s or even early 30s. You get a mismatch between the reward systems, which are highly active in adolescence, and the slow development of the pre-frontal cortex.
You asked about what we should focus on and we could think about that. It has already been mentioned by my two colleagues, but self-regulation is really important in many ways in the digital world, particularly if you think about our ability to regulate our digital behaviour and put down our phones when they are bombarding us with exciting stimuli driven by algorithms that tailor our feeds to our interests. Even as adults, it is really hard to put our phones down if we are constantly seeing interesting things. As a child or an adolescent, whose pre-frontal cortex is developing, it is even harder.
Q5 Dr Gardner: Professor Mareschal, I am really pleased that you are focused on the early years, nought to seven, because there does not seem to be quite as much research there. My question is about linking that to some of the cognitive shifts. Synaptic density increases around the age of three and then pruning starts. Then, at about the ages of five to seven, there is significant pruning. You said it is a continuous thing, but there are certain very key stages of development. Emotional regulation starts coming in at about three. In a lot of the reading that I am doing there is a question about the impact of any type of interaction with screens, whether passive or active. Do we lack research or should we be looking at banning all screens for children under seven because it is a key time?
Chair: We will come on to the direct stimulus. Can you respond quickly, and then Freddy will explore that in more detail.
Q6 Dr Gardner: It is the age range that I am interested in.
Professor Mareschal: I will give a very quick response. First, on these waves of synapses then prune, the peaks are at different ages in different areas. For example, for visual information the peak is around two; for language, it is around seven or eight, and so forth. Even though the number of connections has gone down, it does not mean that no more learning is happening at that point. We can continue to learn new visual features and words in language, even as adults, although we may not be quite as good as a young child is. There is not this kind of critical cut-off. There will be periods where the brain is more plastic—more susceptible to certain information. That depends on what part of the brain and what kind of feature or dimension that you are interested in. To finalise, there is no research on that. That is one of the key problems. We have no causal research. A lot of this is speculative or comes from associations.
Q7 Martin Wrigley: Professor Blakemore, I am interested in your age range. You just told us that this sort of content is addictive. I think that is what you said without saying the word “addictive”. Is there any point in your age of study from 10 to 24 where there is a significant change in regard to something like social media? Currently, 13 is the age that you are supposed to be before you can have a social media account. Is there any justification for other age brakes? There is talk of banning social media for under-16s, but I can see nothing in what you have said so far that indicates that 16 is any better or worse than 13.
Professor Blakemore: Broadly speaking, you are right. Neuroscience can tell you how the brain develops over the course of development from the early years to, say, the 20s. What it cannot do at the moment is pinpoint a precise age at which someone is suddenly able to cope with the content of social media or any other kinds of age limits we talk about in the law, such as the ages of consent, legal maturity or criminal responsibility. We can contribute to the debate about when those age limits should be set, but neuroscience cannot pinpoint a precise age. That is for many reasons, including the fact that the individual differences in brain development are vast. Not everyone’s brains develop at the same rate and the individual difference are huge, so what works for one person will not work for another. That makes sense if you know children and young people; they are all very different with different levels of maturity.
Chair: Yes, my 14-year-old daughter is probably much more mature than I was at 17. We will now drill down in a bit more detail into the impact in different areas.
Q8 Freddie van Mierlo: First, I will address some questions to Denis Mareschal about young infants and children, and then move on to Professor Blakemore. I am very interested because I have a child below three, so I will hoover up all the information you give us. What does the evidence show the impact of digital devices is, whatever form they come in, on infants and young children? Can you also reflect on how we know that? You spoke about the difficulties in doing research, and I can imagine it being very difficult to do in zero to three-year-olds.
Professor Mareschal: I will start with the second one: how do we know that? There is very little, if any, causal research in the early years. Almost everything is correlational, so we observe two things happening together. I am sure that this audience is aware of the difference between those, but I will just illustrate it.
Ten years ago, there was a hoo-ha about the dangers of video games, and a researcher and fantastic colleague, Daphné Bavelier, came out and said that interacting with these first-person shooter games had positive benefits, and that people who played a lot of these video games had much better visual attention skills. But, from that, we cannot draw the conclusion that playing the games had caused an improvement in visual attention skills. It could well be that those who are good at processing lots of visual information are then good at the game and continue playing. The direction of causality is never clear by just observing the co-occurrence of things.
There is very little evidence about the use of digital media with young children, and what is there is entirely correlational. My colleague Sam Wass, who was at the roundtable, has been talking about video or cartoon-type stimuli presented to young children, particularly making a case that manufacturers had moved to having fast-changing stimuli. The reason for that—remember I said that there are multiple systems in the brain and the brain is a lot of different things—is that we have a vigilance or attention-capture system; when something rapid is happening, you want to turn and find out what it is. This triggers the vigilance system, so babies and young people are constantly attuned to that. Learning requires being a little bit slower and lots of repetitions, so it is not necessarily the best form of teaching kids.
Sam Wass goes on to say that this rapid information software has been found to relate to anxiety and later mental health issues. The evidence for that is entirely based on animal models, because you need to intervene directly on the brain to establish what the causal relation is. Again, we have no causal evidence of this. His evidence is the strongest and says that some kinds of digital media are impacting on different parts of the brain differentially in young children, but again there is not a causal smoking gun.
Q9 Freddie van Mierlo: What is the evidence for the impact of digital devices on children then?
Professor Mareschal: I just want to repeat that there is very little, or none. I want to take the opportunity to step back a bit and ask what you mean by digital devices. Everyone is thinking about phones at the moment, but there are lots of other digital devices. There are iPhones, screens and other things such as virtual reality-type systems, which are branded as immersive reality and so forth and are coming into early years environments. We do not really understand that this is not just vision; it is like putting someone in a completely different world. We do not really understand what the impact of that might be on the child’s developing motor skills and understanding of the physical properties of the world.
I just want to say one positive thing, because there are positives to these digital technologies. I have a colleague in Australia called Jordy Kaufman, who did some work a little while ago looking at the positive value of screen time on building family cohesion. In that case, he was actually talking about Teams and Zoom. For families where one of the parents is away and travelling all the time, or the grandparents are far away, regular use of these kinds of video calls actually strengthens family unity. So we have to be careful not to tar all digital technologies with the same brush.
Q10 Freddie van Mierlo: That is a relief; my daughter does a lot of Teams and Zoom calls with grandparents, so that is reassuring. It actually helps her with language development as well; we are teaching her German.
What do we know, though, about—have we done any kind of brain scans or anything like that so we can learn more about the physical structure of the brain and how that is impacted by screen use? We might not be talking about phones for nought to three-year-olds, but perhaps about TV or different forms of that screen use.
Professor Mareschal: Very little has been done in terms of brain scans. I should also say that, when we talk about brain scans, there are two things to think about. There are the changes in the structure of the brain, with something like MRIs—the scanner things that you have seen—measuring the architecture. Then there are the functional changes to the brain; you may not have wiring differences that you can pick out in the structure, but the brain, or parts of the brain, could be working in slightly different ways, processing information in different ways, and be more or less efficient at transferring information from one part of the brain to the next part.
Structural scanning—structural information—is reasonably easy to do with young children, because you can put them to sleep, scan them while they are asleep, and the brain is just there. Functional information—how the brain is interacting, thinking and so forth—is really hard, because, for example, to do a functional brain scan, you need the individual to sit in that tube thing and not move by more than a few millimetres for about 20 minutes. You are already laughing—
Emily Darlington: You are not going to get a two-year-old to do that.
Professor Mareschal: Right, you don’t do that. You can for exceptional health reasons; you can sedate them or whatever, but then you are not getting the actual real activity. Even so, what we have remains correlational. You might scan somebody who has been playing a lot of video games and somebody who has not. Again, it is an association. To get at the causality, we would have to intervene somehow: “These randomly allocated kids have to play a lot of video games and these ones aren’t allowed any video games. Then we are going to scan them.” That is, ethically, very difficult to do, if not impossible. We therefore have to look for natural opportunities where something like that happens. I think Finland or Australia’s recent bans on mobile phones and so forth might provide a natural opportunity to study that, but those are very rare. So getting at causality—
Q11 Chair: I will just interrupt, if you don’t mind, just to clarify that. I hear exactly what you are saying. However, is it not the case that we know that certain stimuli produce certain chemicals or hormones—certain effects in the brain—and that those chemicals, hormones or whatever, such as dopamine, have an impact on the brain? Therefore, we can assume, or there can be conjecture, that, if you watch more flashing lights, you will get more dopamine and that dopamine will do certain things to your brain. We cannot actually show the molecules, because we cannot get two-year-olds to sit still, but it is a fair inference that this is happening.
Professor Mareschal: Dopamine, as everyone knows, is a neurotransmitter, and it is one related to the reward system. When dopamine is released, we experience pleasure. It was there to encourage us to continue behaviours in the wild that were useful. We know from lots of animal models exactly how that works in animal brains and, yes, you are quite right: we often infer what is happening in human brains from that, and we know what stimuli will trigger the release of something such as dopamine. But we have to be careful. The developing brain—the changing brain—is changing, by definition, so the impact that those chemicals are having is different at different ages. It is not necessarily the same as the adult impacts. That would be my answer to that.
Chair: My assumption is always that anything that ends in “ine” is addictive in some way, shape or form: morphine, dopamine, heroine—whatever you want to call it.
Q12 Freddie van Mierlo: What impact does adults having a smartphone or screens around a child have? That is something that a lot of parents are now familiar with, as they are very tired and overstimulated themselves. That is something that I do, but should I be worried about it?
Professor Mareschal: I will give my professional and my personal opinion. In my professional opinion, there is very little work on this. This is all very new. There are a number of studies looking at the presence of a distractor like a phone on word learning. Those are quite artificial studies, where you are trying to teach an 18-month-old new words—this is a block; this is a blog. At the same time, in one condition, the phone rings and mum picks it up while doing it. In the other condition, she doesn’t. Then you compare whether the phone ringing or interrupting have an impact on word learning, and there is some preliminary evidence that it does.
But we need to be a bit careful. These are very short-term studies in unnatural environments, and in the real world mum might repeat the instruction. These well-controlled scientific things are designed specifically to get at the pure causal factor, but it is maybe not quite as natural as what happens in the real world. So, to summarise, there is very little evidence, and it is all very new.
My personal opinion, which is based on being a parent and having worked with parents, is that we need to be a bit careful not to hold up a holy version of what parenthood is, which was never true. The parent was never giving 100% of their attention to the child. Maybe the parent was busy dealing with the other six children or managing the household.
An anecdote that I often tell my students is that in the ’60s, I was cared for by my grandmother for a while. She used to wheel me out to the back of the garden in a pram and leave me for two to three hours in the afternoon, because that was the done thing, and it hasn’t done me any harm—I hate it when people say, “It hasn’t done me any harm.” I am not suggesting that we all go out and do that, but the point is that there is this mythical view that there will be 100% attention, but that just does not happen.
It is detrimental to parents to guilt trip them about this. We can come on later to recommendations, but we should be thinking about providing better evidence to parents, and better support for how they should be dealing with this, but we will talk about that later.
Q13 Freddie van Mierlo: I totally agree with being sympathetic towards the stresses that parents have and how they deal with that. Let me come on to adolescence and children. These are similar questions, but we are probably thinking more about phones and social media use in that group. Perhaps that group is easier to study too. What evidence do we have about the impact of the use of digital devices and social media?
Professor Blakemore: What evidence do we have of the impact of digital devices or social media on the adolescent brain? Almost nothing. There are a few small studies, but they have not been replicated, and they are purely correlational.
On your question about whether we can make inferences, we do not have direct evidence, but we do have a lot of evidence that we can make inferences from. We have already talked about evidence about brain development—we know a lot about. In the context of social media, we also know a lot about how the social brain develops in adolescence. As Dusana mentioned, the social brain is this network of brain regions that we use to understand and interact with other people. That social brain network undergoes very substantial and protracted development right throughout adolescence and into early adulthood.
At the same time, that is accompanied by a social reorientation. Adolescents become more and more interested in their peers and friends. They are very motivated to think about their peers’ opinions and evaluations, to be included by their peer group and to work out what the social norms are. Those are developmental needs that we need to go through in order to become an independent adult. The whole point of the period of adolescence is to become independent of your families and parents, to become affiliated with a peer group, to learn about social hierarchies and to make your own social connections. That is what most adolescents spend a lot of time doing.
Social media provides them with a very easy way of trying out all those different social needs, like making new social connections, affiliating with peers, figuring out social norms and developing their sense of self-identity. It is not really surprising that adolescents are very drawn to social media—they are the biggest users of social media and digital devices as an age group. The very same social needs that draw them to social media also make them vulnerable to its potential harms through things like being excluded online by peer groups or being bullied, as well as unrealistic body norms and that kind of thing.
Q14 Freddie van Mierlo: Are you saying that, in a way, the social media use is preparing them for a world dominated by social media, and that those are the types of interactions that they may have to negotiate in the future? Or is that also to the exclusion of real-world interactions?
Professor Blakemore: I am more saying: why are they so enticed by social media? Why do young people find it particularly difficult to stop using social media? It is because social media provides them a window into their social worlds and a way of connecting with other peers, or other young people.
Yes, that is another point. When we think about the effects of social media on brain development or mental health in adolescence, as I expect you have heard from us and many other people, we really do not have very good evidence on that. Unfortunately, the evidence is just not very high-quality, and it is all correlational.
However, what we can think about is things like the displacement of other really important activities. If you are spending hours and hours on your phone every day, what is that taking you away from? What other really important developmental processes is that taking you away from, such as real-life social interaction with other people, or physical activity, sport, extracurricular activities and all the sorts of other things that young people probably benefit from?
Q15 Freddie van Mierlo: Is there something specific about an adolescent brain that means they are going to spend more time on social media, or that they are going to be more vulnerable to the addictive nature of it? Or is that basically similar across all ages?
Professor Blakemore: No, I think that is exactly right. There are two aspects, and I have mentioned both. First, the development of the pre-frontal cortex makes it much harder for them to regulate their social media behaviour and put down their phones, when their phones are bombarding them with alluring, exciting social content. Secondly, the development of their social brain means that they are motivated to be included by peer groups and make new social connections, and that is very easily done on social media. Yes, there are age-related effects.
Q16 Freddie van Mierlo: Dr Dorjee, how might the digital environment influence a child’s emotional regulation and social skills? You have spoken about how important self-regulation is amongst children, but how might interaction with digital devices help or hinder that?
Dr Dorjee: As my colleagues have said, there is not a lot of direct evidence involving brain scanning, which would allow us to track changes in the brain structure and function. However, there is some evidence that evaluated the impact of screen time on children’s executive function, which is linked to the development of the pre-frontal cortex and the executive network I spoke about. There is some evidence suggesting that excessive screen time is associated with lower executive function, and also less social competencies.
Perhaps the strongest evidence that I have found was an intervention study in Denmark. In a randomised, controlled trial over two weeks, they reduced family screen time, meaning that the time the children spent on screens over a week was reduced to less than three hours. That trial found that the reduction in screen time resulted in lowering of emotional difficulties in children after two weeks, which is quite quickly. That is the strongest evidence I know that shows this kind of causal relationship, in a sense, that implies that excessive screen time might be problematic.
I would like to come back to something that Sarah-Jayne said. As she said, it is not necessarily always about whether the devices themselves cause harm, but what children would have been doing instead. That is particularly important in childhood because of the fast neurodevelopment, neuroplasticity and the establishment of the brain networks that I have talked about, which shape the lifelong trajectories of mental health, wellbeing, cognitive performance and so on.
If children were not on their devices, they would interact with others, play, and receive multisensory input that digital devices cannot provide—the range of touch, smell and integration with the other sensory modalities. They would also not be able to receive immediate feedback, so they could develop self-regulation through turn taking in a conversation, for example, where they know when it is time for them to speak and listen and can sustain their attention through listening. They learn through pretend play—pretending to be someone and then planning steps in different activities. They learn through playing team games in sports. The bigger worry is that excessive screen time may prevent them from engaging in those activities, which are instrumental for the healthy development of the networks that I mentioned.
The type of activity also matters. There is some research that shows that even with excessive screen time, if the screen time is filled with educational content, it has much less of a negative impact on children’s mental health, wellbeing and emotional regulation than if they are exposed to poor content. The type of content and the type of activity and whether it is active or passive also matter. My colleague talked about this a bit already. We know that video games tend to improve visuospatial skills, even though there is a question about whether those skills transfer into everyday life or whether they are just specific to playing a video game. That should be kept in mind when interpreting those results. In comparison, scrolling on social media or being on YouTube provides children with brief bursts of stimulus that they cannot put together in a meaningful way. Compare that with watching TV, where there is a story unfolding; that is also passive, but they can follow a character, follow their reasoning and think through their journey. That sustains children’s attention, their executive network and their salience network in a more meaningful and less overstimulating way than watching, for example—
Chair: Sorry to interrupt, Dr Dorjee. We will come on to the specifics of particular technologies and platforms in a moment, and we would be grateful if you came in on that too.
Q17 Dr Gardner: This is almost a repeat of what I asked earlier, to be truthful. I am reading here about a fast-moving, attention-seeking type of content. It is the sort of thing you use when you have a toddler in full tantrum mode—the age range of three to five is when emotional regulation starts to fine-tune—to get them out of that. You see parents giving the phone to distract them and calm them down with fast-moving content.
However, that content also creates a fight or flight response, because it activates the sympathetic nervous system. When you take the phone away, the child is now in a heightened state of agitation because they are experiencing a fight or flight response. That creates a real negative feedback loop where the child wants that type of content.
Going back to what I said to you before, if self-regulation is a key predictor of future outcomes, and if parents are using putting the phone in front of children as a tool—I do not criticise them—to keep them quiet while they are in the pub, in a meeting, doing something quiet and so on, we are creating a negative feedback loop where the child is not developing self-regulation and they are getting a heightened sense of agitation. We could give out guidance to parents or content developers saying, “This is going to be the practicality of it, but this is the potential impact”. I hear that there are no studies on this. What would your simple answer be on what guidance we could give?
Professor Mareschal: I will give a short reply and then a simple answer. My short reply is that the key here is what is excessive. Everything you have said is true if there is excessive use of it, but if you are at a wedding and your child is having a meltdown and for once you give them the phone to use, it will not damage them for life. Similarly, you are driving to Scotland—which I have done with my kids—and they are bickering. You put on a video in the back, and they watch that for three hours. It is not something you would do at home normally, but it keeps you sane and therefore a better parent. All those sorts of occasional scenarios are fine. It is when you do it all the time—every time they have a tantrum—that they then get an association with needing to have that. We need to think about what “excessive” is. Very simply, the answer is about giving guidance to manufacturers about the impact of different types of content and usage.
Chair: We are coming on to that issue now. To be clear, we are in the realm of inference, correlation, assumption—and to be honest, parental anecdote. That is for all of us, overwhelming in its volume, as it is in the educational environment and elsewhere. However, the science is catching up slowly.
Q18 Emily Darlington: I will declare an interest in that I am the parent of both a teenager and a primary school child. You are absolutely right that we all have a bias based on our own experiences with our own children.
I want to start with you, Denis, and pick up where you have just left off. As you said, there is a difference between “excessive” and “occasional”. In my mind, that is a bit like the Government saying that children should eat five portions of fruit and vegetables a day, but quite frankly at Christmas have the chocolate.
Professor Mareschal: Absolutely. In fact, I am hoping towards the end to have some kind of analogy with nutrition. We should eat well with a balanced diet and have guidance from the Government along with education for people and regulation of food producers so that we do not have those extremes. However, if you have that chocolate cake and ice cream on your birthday, it is fine.
Q19 Emily Darlington: This is going to be a running theme through the three stages of development: what is the importance of imagination and boredom? I was always raised to believe that it is good to be bored because it helps your brain develop and process—although my father was a geneticist, not a neuroscientist. You were talking about displaced activity, particularly between ages zero and three. I think of sitting in the garden, in the pram, and watching the shade on the tree leaves. What is the importance of that period in terms of displaced activity for those aged zero to three?
Professor Mareschal: I know that it is a recurring mantra that there is very little information, but we do know about the importance of imagination and curiosity—which is the word I use rather than boredom. The reverse of that is that there is quite a lot of neuroscience evidence suggesting that the seeking out of new information and experiences is intrinsically rewarding. It releases dopamine—that magic word—which is part of how the brain works. Boredom is a state of reduced information seeking identification, so you get reduced dopamine reward and therefore the brain and body want to increase that pleasure. The way to do that is to seek out new information, be curious, explore new experiences and so forth. That is critical and it is part of the way we discover new parts of the world.
In the literature on learning, there is a distinction between “exploit” and “explore”. If you have a bit of knowledge, for example, I like apples and know that I will generally find apple trees in Mrs Smith’s garden, should I then always go to Mrs Smith’s and exploit my knowledge, or should I explore more widely because there might be someone who has better apple trees down the road? The brain is constantly balancing the need to exploit what we already know versus exploring in the hope of discovering something even better. Part of training that exploration is done during those periods of boredom that let the child or individual figure out how to gather new information and satisfy their curiosity. If that is completely lost, it is not good for development. However, you can have curiosity within a digital medium as well. It is not the essence of digital media that they are going to numb you; it is a question of how they are used and what content they have.
Q20 Emily Darlington: So it is passive versus exploration?
Professor Mareschal: Generally, I agree with that, but we were told that in, say, television programmes, you can be watching a story, yet something is unfolding because you are presumably actively, inside your head, imagining what is going to happen next—imagining yourself as the knight in the castle and so forth.
Q21 Emily Darlington: Should we be more focused on the quality of the material, versus the quantity, or are they both relevant?
Professor Mareschal: They are both relevant. The quality is critical. As has been said elsewhere, the priorities of manufacturers are not necessarily the priorities of public health. Lots of sugar will keep you coming back, and lots of fast-moving images in cartoons for young infants will keep them engaged, but it is maybe not the best thing to do that all the time. Quality is critical: we need a rich and diverse diet, as we were saying before. The child should be doing a lot of different things.
As the title of this Committee says, children are growing up in a digital world, so not giving them any exposure to digital technologies is going to be obstructive to their development and their ability to assimilate and adapt to the environment in which they live. I started by saying that one of the great strengths of the human brain is its plasticity and ability to adapt to the environments that the child is born in. That environment changes; it is not the same as ours. They are going to be in a digital environment, so they have to have some exposure to that as part of learning and growing up in that world. But I agree with you that it cannot be the only thing that they are exposed to.
Q22 Emily Darlington: Fantastic, thank you. Dr Dorjee, let me move on to the next stage of the development of the child—the primary school age, which you are focused on. I have a similar question: where is Government intervention most effective? Is it on quality, quantity, both or none?
Dr Dorjee: I agree with my colleague that quality absolutely matters. Often, what children see—particularly online—is poor-quality content. We know that educational content can have protective effects, even if the exposure to digital media is excessive. Having exposure to high-quality educational content is the key.
I like to think about this question in three ways. The first is the amount. We have established that an excessive amount, if it is regular, is not good for children. If it is occasional, it is okay.
When it comes to content, we are on quite solid ground in saying that the type of content matters. Flashy, addictive content that is not necessarily age appropriate is likely to be detrimental, whereas educational content is likely to have some positive effects, or neutral effects.
The third thing is active versus passive engagement—the mode of engagement. As we have mentioned, there is some evidence about what happens if children are more active or interactive. Evidence from one study showed that messaging is supportive of mental health and wellbeing, whereas being on social media is not. So the type of engagement—whether it is active or passive—matters. Those are the three things that we need to keep in mind at primary school age and probably across ages.
Q23 Emily Darlington: Brilliant. To go on from this, active versus passive in the context of algorithms—is that the difference between being fed content and actually picking what you want to watch next? Is that active versus passive, or are you talking more about Times Tables Rock Stars, which all primary school kids have to use, in which they not only practise their multiplication tables, but create an avatar, buy new outfits for it and get a reward factor that way? What do you mean by active versus passive?
Dr Dorjee: That is a very good question. I think it is both. We know that children are growing up with the use of apps for educational purposes, and we know that those apps can have a positive impact on their academic performance. They are engaging and support their learning. That is an example of active use and active engagement with digital devices that is helpful.
When it comes to social media, you are right. By active versus passive, I mean whether they are choosing and deciding or are being automatically fed content. I can come back to some of the neuroscience evidence and maybe extrapolate a bit, based on what we know from studies, mostly with adults. You may remember that I talked about the three networks: salience, executive and default mode.
When children—and adults—scroll automatically, we establish that their reward network becomes overactivated, as does their default mode network. They are more in this daydream, distracted state of mind. What is needed is for them, developmentally, to be able to establish a balance across these three networks. Actively choosing what they are engaging with activates the executive network and the salience network signals when that shift should happen.
That is the key for them to be able to regulate their emotions and behaviour later. If they are running on that autopilot of being fed information without actively choosing, it is creating or introducing an imbalance in activity across those three networks. We know from studies that particularly diminished activity or insufficient separation across the networks predicts mental health problems later.
Q24 Emily Darlington: That is a really interesting insight because, again, we want the science base in order to figure out where the Government intervention should be. Actually bringing it down to real things, I just want to push that a little bit further. You talked about messaging being quite important. When we are talking about primary school ages, is that messaging people they know, or do they get the same response if they are just messaging anybody, or even an AI platform or companion chatbot?
Dr Dorjee: This study looked at messaging friends. It was not a chatbot and it was not a random person. This was people they knew, which makes sense because it is as close as it gets to real world interactions, with active responding in the digital world with real people. In that case, it did not have a detrimental effect and possibly had a positive effect. When it comes to chatbots or random messaging, I do not know of relevant research evidence, but I suspect it would be different.
Q25 Emily Darlington: Again, those are really important parameters. Professor Blakemore, you are looking at those teenage years. Let’s start with the same premise: is it quality over quantity, quantity over quality or both?
Professor Blakemore: It is absolutely both. On quantity—going back to the activities it displaces if you’re spending many hours online—it is about what you are not doing and what you need to be doing in order to develop optimally. On quality, some content is very helpful and positive for young people, and other content is clearly harmful. We do not even really need evidence that some—
Q26 Emily Darlington: Can you go into a bit more detail on that?
Professor Blakemore: Young people use digital devices to learn new information. There is a massive wealth of knowledge out there. It would arguably not be fair on them to cut them off completely from all that online information that is accessible to them, possibly particularly young people from certain backgrounds, such as more deprived backgrounds.
On the other hand, there is content that is clearly harmful, such as violent content, content about eating disorders or content about self-harm, suicide or pornography. I do not know many people who would argue that that is not harmful, at least to some children.
Q27 Emily Darlington: Perhaps to adults, too.
Professor Blakemore: Yes. Quantity and quality both matter. The distinction between passive and active is really interesting. It is not something that I know a lot about, so I do not want to add much to what Dusana has said. In the context of learning, one of my colleagues in my labs, Sara De Felice, works on learning with others compared with learning from books or screens. Learning with others means that you are teaching me some information and there is synchronous and collaborative feedback. That kind of learning is more efficient at all ages—from very early in on babies, right throughout childhood, adolescence and even adulthood—than learning passively from a screen or a book. That is not surprising: we are very social, and we have evolved to learn from other people, and that requires synchronous, live interaction.
You mention AI, and I think that is really interesting, because we do not know whether AI can replace humans in that superiority for teaching other people—we just do not know, and it might very well be possible.
Q28 Emily Darlington: We know that teenagers, in particular, are being targeted with AI chatbots. I have heard some pretty awful stories about grooming language being used to keep people on longer, and about people eventually entering into quasi-sexual relationships with these companion chatbots. We can all see that that is quite a harmful situation, but I am trying to understand the more regular use by many people, including teenagers and young adults, of various types of AI support—asking questions, getting answers and having constant interaction with a particular chat function. I do not want to name any chatbot, in particular, because there many available at the moment, but they involve building up a relationship.
You have talked about the social brain, which is particularly relevant for teens. One thing that teens always talk about in terms of their online use is the social activity for them—they are feeding that social brain. When we talk about protecting people online, what is healthy messaging and social interaction, and what is damaging? Do we have any evidence for which kinds of interactions are one or the other for brain development and mental health?
Professor Blakemore: We do not really have any evidence, and that is one area where we urgently need new evidence, particularly in the context of AI chatbots, which are evolving rapidly. We know that children and young people sometimes do not find it easy to distinguish between reality and fantasy. You see that in children with imaginary friends, for example, and other kinds of fantasy words that they seem to engage in and believe to a certain extent. That might be relevant to chatbots—this propensity to interpret them as somehow real, with minds and emotions. We have a natural propensity to infer mental states and emotions in other animate beings—we do it to each other, but we also do it to animals or cartoon characters that do not have that.
Emily Darlington: My daughter does it to her stuffed animals. They all have personalities they have developed over years and years.
Professor Blakemore: Exactly. This is the research question: we need to think about how children and young people are interpreting AI chatbots and whether they are interpreting them just like they would a friend’s behaviour, suggestions and mental states.
Q29 Emily Darlington: Are you saying that, when it comes to the messaging and social aspect that young people are experiencing, there is no evidence that the messaging in itself is damaging? The content coming through that messaging—the bullying, the grooming and the sharing of violent or misogynistic material, or whatever might arise—is the damaging bit, rather than the messaging itself. Is that right?
Professor Blakemore: We just don’t know. That is probably right, but what is right for one individual might not be applicable to another individual. Some young people might be particularly vulnerable to those kinds of harms, and other young people might not be so vulnerable and might be resilient to them and know how to avoid them better. Taking into account individual differences is really important.
Freddie van Mierlo: Returning to infants for a second, it seems to me that there are two major differences in terms of the availability of this content from when I was growing up. First, it is highly available. When I was growing up, if you wanted to watch cartoons, you had to do it at certain times of day, and if you missed them, that was it. They are now available all the time on YouTube and elsewhere.
The other change, which we talked about, is how that content has changed. It is now very much tailored not necessarily to educational content, but to monetising a child’s attention. Shows like CoComelon have been researched to within an inch of their life to keep a child’s attention. They look at how, if a child might look away, they can mix up the content so that it keeps their attention. Even YouTube Kids is very similar. We are also seeing AI slop—very strange cartoonish cats—coming through that is of very little value.
How do we put some guardrails around that? Those used to exist naturally, because only one of five channels showed things at certain times of day. How do we change this situation?
Chair: Freddie, we are coming on to policy recommendations at the end. It would be good for us to hear the whole evidence base first, but you are on to something. On AI parenting, I would recommend a film called “I Am Mother”, which came out in 2019, and which is worth a watch. For now, let us have Martin explore the evidence base.
Q30 Martin Wrigley: This whole conversation is fascinating and terrifying. I probably come from a similar generation to Professor Mareschal, in that I too was left for hours on end in the pram underneath the apple tree in the garden, which was supposed to be good for you—perhaps that is why I hate apples.
What is coming through quite strongly is that we have very different parts of this world, and I think we often make the mistake of lumping everything together. I have heard sometimes that digital devices can be good and sometimes that they can be used excessively and be bad. However, it is not just about it being a digital device—when I was young, I was told that watching too much television would rot my brain, so we had exactly the same arguments then. Sometimes digital devices are useful and sometimes they are not so useful. Similarly, social networks perhaps have more value than less.
The thing that seems to keep coming back is this idea of maximised digital content—both active and passive—craving attention and perhaps driven by an advertising model. However, I keep hearing that we have no evidence for that. I also keep hearing that this may be causality or it may be correlation. And we hear that there is limited evidence in many of these areas. So how do we start to interpret these links when there is this confusion about what we are talking about, about whether they are doing things to the brain and about whether we are just correlating things?
Dr Dorjee: As scientists we are naturally very careful in saying what know, what we do not know and what the nature of the evidence is. Compare that to the approach of the companies that are making money on digital devices: they do not worry or care about any of that. I would have the tendency here to apply a bit of pragmatic approach and, if we cannot say for sure, grasp on to what is at least most likely and then build on that evidence. We should be careful not to infer something, but also not to get stuck in this limbo of saying, “Well, we just don’t know, so we can’t do anything.”
There are things that we do know and that we can do. I think there was consensus across all three of us that consistent, excessive time spent on social media, at a minimum, makes children and adolescents miss out on the real-world interactions they need for neurodevelopment and the healthy development of neuroplasticity and brain networks. We know that.
The second thing is that we have pretty much established that some types of content are more harmful than others. We should put in place some sort of guardrails, or try to regulate or label different types of content. When we get to the recommendations, I can speak about that more.
It might be helpful to think about something you mentioned. Some 20 or 30 years ago, we had somewhat similar debates about regulating exposure to TV or regulating video tapes, when they came out. Learning from the history of what we did back then and from how we established standards for the content might be helpful in this regard. Some of my colleagues in the education sector have been highlighting that. Finally, we know that active use is better than passive use. It depends on the passive use: are we talking about watching a movie?
I am trying to say that, yes, there is limited evidence—we do not know so much, and we need to invest in research to know more—but there are some basic things that we can think about. We can start to think about the possible implications of regulation of the companies, possible guidance for parents and some things that we can do in education, which I might get to at the end. We know that children who have higher self-regulation to start with are less likely to be negatively impacted by digital devices. My argument would be to developmentally strengthen children’s self-regulation through school curricula. That will be another thing to talk about.
Q31 Martin Wrigley: Thank you. Professor Blakemore, we talked earlier about your range of 10 to 24 years old, causality and a lack of clear causal evidence. How much evidence do we need to act and, more importantly, to pinpoint where action is required?
Professor Blakemore: I will always be on the side of saying that we need evidence. On the other hand, for the kind of content that we talked about earlier and that we clearly know is not good for children, such as content containing violence, pornography or self-harm, do we really need evidence that it is bad for children’s developing minds and brains? I am not sure. I think that, there, we need to act very urgently, with more regulation of social media companies in terms of content.
You asked earlier, Mr Wrigley, at what age we should impose age-limited regulations, if any such regulations are imposed. From an evidence point of view, we really do not know. There, we can contribute information about brain development and the development of cognitive and social processing, but we cannot tell you a precise age that will be true for all children, if asked at what point they will be able to cope with the digital world. Pinpointing that age requires other sources of information.
There is a lot we do not know, but quite a lot we do know. Sometimes, the huge focus we have on social media and digital environments draws us away from areas where we really do have a lot of information about risk factors and protective factors for the development of cognition, the brain and mental health in adolescence. The digital environment is, of course, always relevant but, for example, we have a lot of data on the importance of sleep for development and mental health. We know, for example, that lots of young people use their phones late into the night and are sleep-deprived as a consequence. That is an area in which we could probably act, because there is so much data on the importance of sleep.
Another area is the negative, or potentially harmful, effects of things such as loneliness, and the benefits of other things, such as exercise and having access to green space during adolescence—I am focusing on adolescence, but it is probably true at other ages too. That makes me think that the problem is not directly related to social media. We need to provide alternatives to social media for young people. Why do young people turn to social media? For all the reasons I gave earlier. But what else do they do? There are very few places where they can go and hang out with each other. A lot of people live in urban environments with very little access to green space. There is a reduction in sports and exercise provision for young people. We need to focus not only on the harms of social media, but on the benefits of other things, and provide young people with those things.
Chair: Colleagues, we are into our last 15 minutes, so we need to accelerate. We have talked about kids to a certain extent homogeneously, but, Allison, will you cover the differential impacts, perhaps? I would then like to spend the last 10 minutes on policy proposals for the future. I completely agree that a modern phenomenon is parents’ fear stopping kids playing outside. I played out my entire childhood, pretty much, but my kids do not play out at all. Allison, over to you.
Q32 Dr Gardner: I will try to keep this very simple. I have been reading about the potential differential impacts for socioeconomic groups and ethnic groups, which are quite telling, so any comment on that will be welcome. Also, what really stands out to me is the link with neurodiverse children, ADHD and autism. From reading the information, there is a link with sleep patterns and autism, and with ADHD, and social media, gaming use and attention. My question, which I feel is controversial but may not be, is about causality, particularly from an early age. I think that that would be very difficult to prove, so I would be grateful for a comment on that. I will go to Sarah-Jayne first.
Professor Blakemore: It is probably better to go to Dusana and maybe Denis, because they work in that area and I do not.
Dr Gardner: Dusana, I will go to you first.
Dr Dorjee: Coming back to the brain networks, I would like to highlight that children with ADHD have—for neurodevelopmental reasons—an imbalance in the three networks that I mentioned to start with. The networks separate later, but they tend to cluster together, so they have a pre-existing vulnerability that makes them more susceptible to the negative impacts of digital media engagement, which we have mentioned.
That is what the research shows: that those children are more likely to engage in problematic use of digital media; they are more likely to have negative effects from higher exposure to digital media; and they are more likely to go into problematic use of video games, even, because of those pre-existing vulnerabilities. We should be super careful, particularly when interpreting and considering the evidence.
Something similar holds for children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, but for different reasons. Poverty is one of the main stressors. I have spoken about the stress response and how it links to executive control, but research shows that stress hormones are neurotoxic, and they particularly impact on areas in the brain such as the pre-frontal cortex and the hippocampus, which we have spoken about—areas in the brain that are involved in self-regulation and emotion regulation. An increased stress response also negatively impacts sleep. Therefore, children from low socioeconomic status have a pre-existing vulnerability in those systems that impact on the development of the networks that we are talking about. That is why, again, some research evidence suggests that excessive time spent on digital media has different effects on children from high socioeconomic status and from lower socioeconomic status. It affects children from lower socioeconomic status more negatively—
Dr Gardner: Thank you. I am interrupting in the interests of time. Do you have a quick comment, Professor Mareschal?
Professor Mareschal: I have a very short comment. In the under-threes, it is hard to say anything about neurodevelopmental disorders because many of the children are not diagnosed until after three, so we do not know whether the child that is engaging a lot at the moment with, say, a cartoon is one who will subsequently be diagnosed with ADHD.
Q33 Chair: Thank you. It has been a fascinating session so far, but we want to pull it all together and get your recommendations. In the interests of time, you will each have three to four minutes. May we please have your primary policy recommendations and, most importantly, where you think research should go to inform future decisions? Professor Blakemore, will you go first?
Professor Blakemore: Okay, but these are my views, not the views of the universities, academies or societies I am associated with. In my view, we have enough evidence that some content is harmful to young people, and we need to protect children and young people from that harmful content. The question is, how do we do that? A social media ban sounds really simple, and I hear it all the time. Of course, it is being carried out in Australia, and many other countries are considering it, but it is actually not simple for young people.
If I can summarise it in one sentence, that is because if young people’s friends are online, they are going to be online. For the reasons I talked about earlier, they are very driven to be connected with friends and included in their social groups. They do not want to be the only one not online. That is what we are seeing in Australia, where adherence to the ban is very, very low: it is about a third, so two thirds of children under the age of 16 are still online. It is very easy to game the system by using VPNs, making up false birth dates and so on.
I read a study this week; it was on a small group, but it makes sense in terms of what we know about the social needs and social norms in adolescence. Children under the age of 16 in Australia were asked, “Why aren’t you adhering?”, and they said, “Because all my friends are online, so why would I go offline?” They were then asked, “What percentage of your peers would need to comply with the ban and go offline for you to go offline?”, and they said about two thirds. We therefore have this problem whereby until at least two thirds of young people are offline, none of them are going to be. It is a kind of tipping-point problem.
That brings me to the idea of social norms in adolescence being really important. We can sit here, as adults, saying that bans should be imposed on children, but that is not going to work if they are not motivated to comply with the ban. The main thing that will motivate them is changing the social norms of their age group, and they have the power to do that themselves.
I do not like the analogy with smoking; I think it is really problematic—and this is not an analogy with smoking—but I would use smoking as an example where social norms have changed over the last 30 years. Thirty years ago, it was very fashionable and very common for teenagers to smoke. I was a teenager 30 years ago; I remember. It was very normalised. Now, it is not. Smoking rates have come right down in teenagers, both in this country and particularly in places such as California, where almost no teenagers smoke cigarettes now. That is because of a change in social norms, so it is possible.
Q34 Chair: So your policy proposal is, what, a public health information campaign along the lines of “Wear your seatbelt,” “Don’t smoke,” “Don’t drink while you’re pregnant,” “Don’t drink and drive”—those things that change a kind of social perception of a harmful practice?
Professor Blakemore: My first policy recommendation would be to place much heavier regulation on the social media companies to make their platforms safer. Just imposing a ban might take the onus off the social media companies, which we really do not want to do.
The second recommendation would be some kind of public health campaign aimed at young people, but that would need to be co-produced with young people. They need to be empowered; their voice really needs to be heard there.
Thirdly, as I mentioned earlier, we need to provide alternatives. Why are young people turning to social media? Because they do not have so many exciting alternatives, and we need to provide them.
Q35 Chair: Understood, thank you. Sorry to rush you. Professor Mareschal, what are your recommendations?
Professor Mareschal: My recommendations would be very similar. Interestingly, it differs because I am focusing on the younger age group: I would say, “Let’s focus on the parents,” because ultimately it is the parents making decisions about what the two, three and four-year-olds are doing. In that regard, I would highly recommend exactly what Sarah-Jayne said: some kind of public health-type programme.
I like the analogy of nutrition: empower adults by educating and informing them, telling them what is good, what is bad and what the consequences are. If there are extreme cases—for example, if your child has diabetes—doctors can intervene or give you tools to stop giving them that extra sugar. If the child has a mental health proclivity, and that is identified in a medical context, then something special can be done, but otherwise it is about providing the right information for the parents to make decisions.
That should go hand in hand, as Sarah-Jayne was saying, with proper investment in alternatives. For young children, that means good-quality video programmes, for example, as produced by things like the BBC, but not just the BBC, and some regulation of or obligation on the producers of this content to, let us say, reduce the sugar in their products.
Q36 Chair: And your research priority?
Professor Mareschal: I guess there are two. One is trying to find brain-imaging or neuroscience evidence in the wild—in the real world, not in these tube-type things. There are technologies developing where we can start to do that. We do that in our centre: you put some recording equipment on a child’s head to record their brain activity while they are interacting with other children. That is the first thing.
Very quickly, the other thing is that we absolutely need an understanding of the impact of AI-enhanced technologies on child development and on the parents. Parents use social media to get information about how to parent, but what they are being told is fed by some algorithm. I am not anti-AI; it is just that we need some control of what is going on.
Q37 Chair: Very good. In the last four minutes, Dr Dorjee, what are your policy recommendations and areas of research?
Dr Dorjee: I have recommendations in three areas, the first of which is about the regulation of digital content and social media companies. We have not spoken about this very much, but it would be very helpful if across platforms there were a requirement to clearly label AI-generated content, and perhaps also the possibility of opting out of AI-generated content. We have not spoken about blurring the borders between reality and what is not real, but I think that can also have an impact on children in adolescence.
I would also recommend that social media companies introduce compulsory breaks in their algorithms. For example, if someone has been scrolling for seven or 10 minutes, there should be an automatic break that asks them about the content they want to see, which would shift the activity towards the executive network and the better executive control that we have been talking about. I would also suggest that social media companies should be required to introduce digital literacy content into their algorithms, so that engaging digital literacy content is shown at regular intervals to users who are auto-scrolling.
I agree with my colleagues about the need to have a solid parent-oriented app that has age-specific recommendations for parents on the things that we have been talking about, such as the amount of time on digital media, type of content and passive versus active engagement. It should also have actionable recommendations, such as where they can go to change the settings, or how to interact with children and talk to them about social media.
Finally, my last recommendation is basically to strengthen mental health and wellbeing curriculums in schools, so that we increase children’s capacity as protected factors, particularly their self-regulation capacity. In this digital age, I think our minds have to evolve with some of these challenges.
Q38 Freddie van Mierlo: Do you think there are any ways in which we can change the incentives for platforms like YouTube, whose only goal is to keep you on the platform as long as possible, compared with something like the BBC, which is governed by its charter and required to have educational content?
Professor Mareschal: I do not have a clear answer, but I can think of two things. The first, obviously, is punitive interventions. The other thing is that if you change the public’s behaviour, the platforms will follow, because they want the public to respond in a way that generates funds for them. If we educate the public about the dangers of the addictive scrolling, and they then seek out different types of material, YouTube and other media companies may then move that way. Maybe that is just being naive, but that is my suggestion.
Dr Gardner: When you are scrolling on TikTok for an excessive amount of time, I believe it says, “Do you want to continue scrolling?” Of course, I would just go, “Yes”, and carry on watching “Rufus the Bull”, but a break should mean a break.
Chair: When you were scrolling, Instagram used to tell you, “You’re all caught up”, which meant that you had already seen everything you were seeing, but it does not do that any more. They removed it because it was obviously a break in their activity.
Thank you very much for what has been a really fascinating session. We could have gone on for much longer—our apologies that we are time-constrained. There are lots of areas that we could have explored; I wanted to talk to you about technoference and the impact on attachments, particularly at the very early stages in life. I am hearing anecdotally in my own constituency that in primary schools, children are coming in with not entirely secure attachments, because the parents’ faces are in the phone, rather than connecting with the babies. There are lots of implications in the science of this that we have yet to explore, but we are very grateful to you all for giving us your time this morning.