Since the rules came in, I keep noticing the same pattern, in the young people I work with and in my own house.
When the rules change, the visible fight often stops before the real issue does. The yelling about screen time stops. The dinner-table standoffs stop. On paper, things look calmer.
But quieter is not the same as better. Sometimes a young person hasn't settled, they've just stopped fighting and started withdrawing. They drift to their room earlier. They answer in fewer words. The phone battle is over, and somehow the thing you were actually worried about hasn't moved at all.
I've been thinking about that gap a lot since December.
By mid-December, the platforms had removed or restricted about 4.7 million accounts flagged as belonging to under-16s. That is accounts, not kids: plenty of young people had more than one. Within three months, eSafety was reporting significant gaps, with some under-16s keeping old accounts, spinning up new ones, or getting past age checks that weren't robust enough. The policy made history. The enforcement, predictably, got complicated.
I want to step around the politics of all that, because it will be argued for years, and it isn't where I'm useful. What I can offer is the view from the actual work. And from where I sit, the most important thing the restrictions revealed has nothing to do with whether they succeed on their own terms.
It revealed how quickly we mistake removing a behaviour for solving a problem.
One of the first things you learn working with young people is that the behaviour you can see is rarely the whole thing you're dealing with.
The phone use is a behaviour. So is the disengagement, the back-chat, the kid who won't get out of bed, the kid who can't put the controller down. Adults often treat the behaviour as the problem, because it's what we can see, and what's annoying us. Stop the behaviour, problem solved.
But behaviour is a messenger. Very often, it is doing a job for the young person, even when the job is hard for an adult to see. Strip the behaviour away without asking what job it was doing, and you may not have solved much. You've just made the messenger go quiet.
That is, more or less, what a blanket restriction does. It can interrupt a behaviour. It does very little to address the underlying need.
When I look at how a lot of young people use these platforms, I keep coming back to three jobs the screen was doing. Sometimes one. Sometimes all three at once.
For a lot of kids, especially the ones who find face-to-face socialising hard, the screen was where their friendships lived. Not a replacement for connection. The main venue for it. Take it away from a confident kid with a full offline life, and they may barely notice. Take it away from an anxious, isolated kid, and you've removed one of the few places they felt socially functional.
We didn't remove the same thing from every young person. We removed very different things, depending on who they already were.
Adolescence runs on a powerful, biologically loaded question: Do I matter to my peers, and where do I fit? This isn't vanity. Laurence Steinberg's work on the adolescent brain helps explain why the teenage years are so exquisitely tuned to peer reward and social standing. Caring what your peers think isn't a character flaw at that age. It's close to a developmental default.
For years, that status game was played out on a screen, in likes and views and follows. Clumsy and often cruel, but it was the arena. Closing the arena doesn't switch off the drive. The need to matter to other people is not a setting you can disable.
This is the one adults are slowest to clock. For a young person in a stressful home, or carrying anxiety, or just having a rough patch, the phone was often an exit. A way to leave the room without leaving the room. A reliable, always-available way to take the edge off a feeling they didn't have other tools for.
When that exit closes, and no other coping skill has been built, the feeling doesn't go anywhere. It sits there, unmanaged, in a young person who was using the screen precisely because they didn't know what else to do with it.
Here's the pattern I'd ask any parent or educator to watch for, because it's often where the real work begins.
When you remove a coping behaviour, the underlying need doesn't disappear. It looks for a new home. Where it lands depends heavily on what's available, and on whether the young person has the skills and relationships to use it.
Give a young person something real to move towards, a sport, a job, a mate who actually picks up the phone, a reason to be somewhere, and the need can migrate somewhere healthier. That is the best-case version, and it is genuinely possible. I've watched kids rediscover real parts of their life in the space a phone used to fill.
But that migration is not automatic, and it is not free. It happens when there is somewhere better to go.
Where there isn't, the need finds the path of least resistance. Another app the rules didn't name. A device that technically isn't covered. A workaround, because a motivated fourteen-year-old will out-engineer a content moderation team more often than not. Or it turns inward, into withdrawal, irritability, low mood, the flat "gone quiet" that adults can easily mistake for the kid settling down. Sometimes it's the opposite. Sometimes it's a young person who has lost their main regulation strategy and been handed nothing to replace it.
The removal was the easy, visible half. The replacement is the slow, invisible half. And it's the half that rarely gets the same urgency, funding, or public attention as the restriction itself.
There's a deeper layer here, and it belongs to all of us, not just to teenagers.
A whole generation has grown up without much practice at being bored.
That sounds trivial. It isn't. Boredom, the plain experience of an empty moment with nothing to fill it, used to be a standard feature of childhood. You sat in the back of the car and watched the world go past. You waited in line with nothing in your hand. You lie on your bed staring at the ceiling. And in all that unfilled time, quietly, you learned something enormous: that you could be alone with yourself and be okay.
The psychologist Donald Winnicott gives us useful language for this. He called it the capacity to be alone, and he saw it as a genuine developmental achievement, one of the real markers of emotional maturity. Not loneliness. The opposite of it. The settled ability to sit in your own company without needing to escape it.
For years, we let a device absorb the empty moments before they could become boredom. For many kids, that skill never got much practice, because the discomfort that builds it kept getting cut short.
Then we removed the device and assumed the skill would be waiting underneath. For plenty of them, it isn't. You can't instantly replace years of practice a young person didn't get.
That's why the quiet hits so hard for some kids. It isn't only that they miss the app. It's that they're meeting an empty moment, maybe properly, in a way they haven't had to before, with no idea what to do inside it.
If you've read this far hoping for a tidy fix, I have to be honest with you. There isn't one, and anyone selling you one is selling you something.
What there is, is direction.
Replace, don't just remove. Taking something away from a young person and leaving a hole is rarely enough. The question isn't only "how do I get them off the screen?" It's "what is the screen doing for them, and what could realistically do that job instead." Connection, status, escape. Whatever need it was meeting, that's what needs a new home.
Treat boredom as training, not as a problem. When a young person says they're bored, the instinct is to fix it. Try, sometimes, to sit with them in it instead. The capacity to tolerate an empty moment is built by tolerating empty moments, ideally with enough support to keep the discomfort manageable. There's no shortcut, and the practice is the point.
Read "gone quiet" carefully. Calm is not the same as okay. A young person who has stopped fighting you might be settling or might be withdrawing. The difference is worth your attention. Ask. Stay close. Don't mistake the absence of conflict for the presence of wellbeing.
Build one real thing. You don't need to reconstruct a young person's whole life. One genuine offline connection, one activity that asks something of them, one reason to be somewhere on a Tuesday night, can do something a restriction cannot do on its own. The goal isn't an empty schedule. It's a fuller one.
None of that is dramatic. None of it makes a headline. It's the ordinary, patient, one-kid-at-a-time work that has always sat underneath real change, and it's exactly the work a policy can't do for us.
We can understand a young person's behaviour without excusing it, and we can guide them without judging them. That principle holds here as much as anywhere.
The phone use was never only the phone use. It was often a young person trying to meet a need with the most available tool they had. The kindest, most useful thing we can do now isn't to congratulate ourselves that the tool has been restricted.
It's to make sure they have a better one.
The screen going dark was the easy part. The quiet that follows, and what we help them build inside it, is the actual work.
NextGen Edge works with young people on exactly this: confidence, direction, and the practical skills that don't come pre-installed. If this resonated, subscribe to Shaping Futures for more practitioner notes, and feel free to share this with someone raising or teaching a young person right now.
Photo by Sasha Freemind on Unsplash