Navigating the virtual world: Belgium’s new advisory report on screens and social media for young people
Earlier this year, I spent a Wednesday morning on a street corner in my hometown Mechelen. Every few minutes a 9-year-old kid would walk by, wearing a bright yellow safety vest. Each of them walked a predetermined route of roughly 3 kilometres, navigating busy streets and tricky intersections. They had first learned how to do this at school, practised in a group, and then had to do it all by themselves. During this ‘pedestrian exam’, they were carefully monitored at a distance by a group of parents and people from the community.
I have been thinking a lot about that day ever since I got involved in the Superior Health Council’s advisory report on screens and social media use among children and young people, published on 4 December 2025. The report does not look at how children navigate traffic, but at how they navigate the virtual world. Here, the risks are different: sleep disruption, exposure to harmful content, cyberbullying, and addictive design features. At the same time, there are real benefits for social connection, learning, identity exploration, and low-threshold access to support.
A key question dominating the public debate in many countries is whether we should ban access to smartphones and social media for our youth. The council’s stance is nuanced. The majority of experts do not consider a general smartphone ban up to the age of 13 sensible. There is, however, support for limiting access to (most) social networks for children under the age of 13.
If no ban, what then? Our recommendations point towards a coordinated national strategy: stronger regulation and platform accountability, safer design standards, support for parents and schools, better digital literacy, and more accessible youth-friendly help services. The report also stresses the need for better data access and more proactive research as digital technologies and AI evolve.
As an involved expert and a parent, I can say that this report proved challenging. Everyone active in this domain has our children’s best interests at heart, but opinions on what that requires us to do tend to diverge. For me, this report gets the balance right. It clearly highlights the many risks of social media and screens, but it also acknowledges the benefits and puts forward concrete and sensible recommendations. The evidence is complex, but the direction is clear. Protecting young people online requires collective action, smarter policy, and platforms that take responsibility instead of pushing it downstream.
A collective approach towards social media and screentime like we take towards traffic does not exist yet. But it should. It is more complex than simply banning access, but it is an effort we should definitely consider.
Read the full report, expertly led by Ernst Koster along with Sylvie Gérard, here.