There was a time when childhood and teenage years were imagined differently from what we see today, constituted around the internet. Games used to be played in accessible playgrounds, courtyards and streets; friends were made through neighbourhood intimacies; learning was organised around the textbook, the embodied teacher’s voice, and the physical classroom. The small acts of regularly sitting beside other children, waiting one’s turn, reading from paper, copying by hand, and discovering that knowledge was not simply information but a gradual process in learning through which one builds attention, memory, friendship, and community. This is not to romanticise an idealised past because the formative years of youth could often be marked by deprivation, caste, gendered exclusion and uneven access to schooling. One cannot deny that the internet – accessed through the black mirrors of our personal computers and smartphones – has opened avenues of learning for many children and teenagers who would otherwise have had little to no route into learning. However, the point is to recognise how the nature of childhood and adolescence has changed. The emphasis has structurally shifted from being on the playground, the street, the classroom, the family courtyard, the printed book, and the peer group to the screen, the algorithmic feed, and the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot. This is not a minor shift – it is a transformation in the very ecology through which children learn to be social, and therefore, to be human.Perils of unregulated accessIn India, we are already seeing the impact that the usage of social media has on young people. For instance, Meta’s significant portion of revenue in India comes from teenagers. The platform knows this and has engineered its products to keep young people engaged through infinite scrolling, frequent notifications, and content that triggers emotional reactions. India now has 490 million social media users, with teenagers being the fastest-growing group. In many ways, the business model relies on capturing and holding their attention. India’s Economic Survey 2025-26 has formally acknowledged what parents and teachers have worried about for years: social media addiction among young people aged 15-24 is a public health emergency. The survey connects heavy social media use with anxiety, depression, aggression and declining attention spans. Social media use among Indian teenagers is widespread and continues to grow rapidly. The problem is real and well-documented. But it is not only teenagers making poor choices. It is also about platforms designed to keep young users engaged for longer because attention drives profit.Child development specialists say social media platforms take advantage of how the teenage brain works. The part of the brain that controls impulse control and decision-making continues to develop until the early twenties. This makes teenagers more vulnerable than any other age group to addictive features like endless scrolling, notifications and constant rewards. Moreover, these platforms are not addictive by accident. Public health advisories have increasingly raised concerns that many social media platforms are intentionally designed to maximize engagement and encourage repeated use, particularly among young users. Fatal consequencesThe impact of this addiction can also be fatal, as some reports have shown. In February 2026, three minor sisters in Ghaziabad died in what investigators believe was a suicide pact influenced by excessive engagement with online content. Within weeks, Karnataka government announced a ban on social media for children under 16. Andhra Pradesh followed, bringing in plans for similar restrictions for children under 13. Now, the Union government is also in active discussions with platforms about age restrictions. However, the problem would be too narrowly defined in law if it treats the issue only as one of social media access because social media and AI chatbots now belong to the larger architecture of the internet – one that is organised around data and programmed to convert attention into profit. AI platforms may appear to belong to a different world from Instagram, YouTube Shorts, or gaming communities, as many may think, but there is no real difference among any of these, because all of them are accessed through our phones or other devices, shaped by the same habits of instant response, trained into the same economy of dependence, and increasingly inserted into learning, companionship, entertainment, and self-expression. The question to ask is what kind of a childhood and adolescence is India preparing for? Do we want them to grow up among peers, teachers, parents, books and communities, or among platforms that predict their desires and machines that give them prompt answers but don’t teach them how to ask better questions?Global standards for regulationSince India is not the only country that has to deal with such questions, examples from the rest of the world can serve as good models to perhaps learn from, emulate, or even adapt to the particular context suited for this country. For instance, Sweden, after years of enthusiasm for classroom digitalisation, has moved back toward printed textbooks, with the Swedish government explicitly investing in more physical books and less screen time in schools. Finland has also moved to restrict the use of mobile phones and digital devices during lessons, with exceptions where devices are genuinely needed. One must see these as not anti-technology gestures but attempts to restore proportion and to distinguish between meaningful educational use and habitual screen dependence. Australia and Britain also offer another kind of lesson. Their under-16 social media ban is becoming a global reference point. What is important for India to note here is not just the age threshold itself, but the surrounding infrastructure: legal duties on platforms, a dedicated online safety regulator, and enforcement mechanisms to place responsibility on companies rather than only on families.The central focus should be on defining the limits of use. It could mean time limits appropriate to age and context. Schools and coaching centres must have policies that protect classrooms from unnecessary device dependence. In this regard, Norway has taken the first step by imposing a near-ban on the use of AI in elementary schools. Further, platforms must be legally required to disable addictive features. There must be restrictions put on application designs that foster a practice of endless scrolling. There should also be limits placed on companies to prevent chatbots from simulating intimacy, dependency or companionship. All of this is possible only if lawmakers work through the presumption that when a platform or AI system is used by children and teenagers, the burden of proof must fall on the company to show that its design is safe – and not on parents or the state to prove harm. Making citizens for the futureThe government in India must take this challenge seriously because of the added layered realities of Indian childhood and youth: caste and class inequality, gendered access to the internet, rural dependence on online learning, the vulnerability of first-generation learners, the different risks faced by children and teenagers in English-speaking elite households and those navigating regional-language internet spaces, and the likelihood that girls, those from low income households, Dalit and Adivasi children, queer children, and children outside stable schooling systems will encounter digital harm in ways that cannot be captured by a single national average.Perhaps Pope Leo XIV’s recent reflections on artificial intelligence are also useful in this regard, as a moral vocabulary for a problem that purely technocratic language often fails to grasp. In his encyclical on safeguarding the human person in the age of AI, he argues that technology must remain ordered to human dignity, truth, social justice, and the common good. For children, this warning has a special relevance. A child is not simply a future worker, or a future consumer. They are future citizens whose sensory capacities are still forming. Their judgments are still developing, and their social world is still being built. Therefore, their dignity requires protection from obvious harm and also from being prematurely converted into a commodity that is data.Sumanta Roy is a PhD student in Cultural Anthropology at Washington State UniversitySoumyadeep Guha is a PhD candidate in History at Binghamton University, New York.