When it comes to social media, parents find it difficult enough to keep up with their offspring’s online world. What hope, then, do governments and regulators have of keeping up with digital technology?

This week, Ofcom has announced a new code of practice which aims to use powers granted under the Online Safety Act in order to ‘tame aggressive algorithms’. Such a move seems well-meaning, but official bodies will always be several steps behind the latest online trends. The onerous-sounding new rules will probably end up restricting the online freedom of less savvy adults more than of children.

A decade or so ago, parents had no idea about the potential negative effects of these addictive apps on young minds

That’s not to say the phone-based childhood is not a significant social concern. WhatsApp, SnapChat, Instagram are new worlds which parents are ill equipped to help their children navigate. Recent research from Ofcom showed that a quarter of British children have a smartphone at the age of seven. By the age of 12, 90 per cent of them do.

Adults fear that social media sucks children into a digital vortex, encouraging them to scroll instead of read and making them ever more anxious, depressed and isolated in the real world. Yet parents who seek to restrict their children’s phone usage often find that they........

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