Unfiltered Access, Unseen Harms: A Developmental and Public Health Critique of Digital Rights Discourse

TL;DR

This paper argues that current digital rights discussions neglect children's developmental needs, risking long-term harm to their wellbeing and social skills.

Contribution

It reframes digital access through a developmental and public health lens, emphasizing age-appropriate limits and supports.

Findings

Early and excessive digital engagement may disrupt key developmental milestones in children and adolescents.

Rights-based approaches often overlook the long-term impact of digital use on youth development.

A multi-layered public health strategy is needed to safeguard children's wellbeing in the digital era.

Abstract

Public health relevance—How does this work relate to a public health issue?
Around the world, experts are grappling with how to provide guidance for the use of technology for recreational and educational pursuits.

Around the world, experts are grappling with how to provide guidance for the use of technology for recreational and educational pursuits.

Public health significance—Why is this work of significance to public health?
Rights-based framings of digital access often under-prioritise developmental vulnerability, and fail to recognise the potential for long-term impact on youth.

Rights-based framings of digital access often under-prioritise developmental vulnerability, and fail to recognise the potential for long-term impact on youth.

Public health implications—What are the key implications or messages for practitioners, policy makers and/or researchers in public health?
Children’s digital participation should be nested within a multi-layered public-health response.

Children’s digital participation should be nested within a multi-layered public-health response.

This article maps and prioritises the foundational developmental needs of children and adolescents: social development, cognitive growth, emotional regulation, identity formation, and moral reasoning. Early and excessive digital engagement is then examined for its potential to impact these milestones, with consequences that reverberate through wellbeing, relationships, and lifelong resilience. Arguments which frame digital engagement as an individual right with potential benefits, downplay developmental risks. Drawing on developmental rights and agency frameworks, the current review disputes the prevailing assumption that digital participation should take precedence over healthy developmental trajectories. Instead, the debate is reframed around children’s evolving capacities. It is proposed that digital entitlements are nested within age-appropriate limits and supports. Protecting the best interests of the child requires recognising the risk of addictive technology use. The rights of the child must also ensure cultivation of emotional competence and self-reliance. Overemphasis on digital expression risks elevating performative self-presentation before moral reasoning, critical thinking, and offline social skills have matured, particularly within environments shaped by algorithmic amplification, transient relationships, peer harassment, and the desire for validation. To address these risks, we advocate for a multi-layered public health response: consistent, developmentally attuned messaging; empowered parents and educators; whole-school strategies; and policy reforms that prioritise safety, accountability, and developmental alignment. By situating digital engagement within a developmental framework, this article proposes key principles on which to base the discussion of safeguarding youth wellbeing in the digital era.

Full text

1. Introduction

Digital technologies are deeply embedded in the daily lives of most children and adolescents. While the advantages of digital technologies for communication and convenience are frequently emphasised, they are often prioritised over developmental consequences. The ways in which early and sustained digital engagement interacts with core developmental processes (e.g., social, neural, and cognitive) are often underexplored. A growing body of evidence points to concerns across multiple domains, including toddler language development [1], neural maturation, brain organisation [2,3], cognitive functioning [4,5,6], emotion regulation capacities [7,8], and social development, where reduced in-person interaction and heightened online comparison appear especially influential [9,10]. Research also indicates that increased reliance on digital platforms for belonging may contribute to compulsive or addictive patterns of internet and social media use [11,12].

In 2025, two influential articles acknowledged many of these harms while proposing that social media may also deliver benefits for youth and adolescents [13,14]. In this article, we argue that identified benefits can be facilitated within moderated interest groups, through access to the internet, and through 1:1 or 1-to-small-group communication with identified others.

We start this review by referring briefly to the topics on which there is agreement. The risks for mental health are:

• Exposure to cyberbullying and unwanted online sexual solicitation (both of which are consistently linked to higher rates of depression, self-harm, and suicidal behaviour in adolescents [15,16,17].
• Exposure to harmful content and communities, including pro-eating disorder material and appearance-focused ideals that negatively impact body image, particularly among girls [13,18].
• Time spent on smartphones and social media is observed to be associated with poor mental health, reduced physical activity, reduced cognitive ability, and sleep disruption [14,19,20].We add:
• Radicalisation, aggression, rising loneliness, lowered self-esteem, and increased emotional fragility in late adolescence [21,22,23,24].

In Australia, rates of adolescent depression have risen sharply (from approximately one in five young people meeting criteria for depression by age 18 to nearly two in three in recent cohorts), mirroring international trends of worsening youth mental health [22,25,26,27]. Moreover, the chronic nature of these difficulties is especially pronounced among girls, roughly half of whom follow persistent depressive courses during adolescence [28], making this developmental period increasingly challenging. We argue that the scale and urgency of mental health problems are, in part, caused by the failure of industry, researchers, and policy advisers to consider how development is interfered with by current digital offerings.

The broader discourse surrounding youth digital use and mental health has become highly contested. Rights-based framings, such as those advanced in the BMJ and earlier commentaries, sometimes underplay the developmental vulnerabilities that shape how young people engage with digital environments [29,30]. Simultaneously, an expanding industry has emerged to address the mental-health problems that appear linked, in part, to intensive or developmentally misaligned technology use. Evidence consistently shows that high levels of smartphone and social-media engagement are associated with depressive symptoms, anxiety, and sleep disturbance [31,32], indicating that downstream interventions are unlikely to be sufficient on their own.

This review seeks to break down the key arguments that have been put forward, which may stifle a multi-layered approach to public health [33]. From a public-health perspective, consistent, developmentally informed messaging is essential to guide community attitudes and support parents in delaying, reducing, or reshaping digital media consumption. Parenting practices (e.g., active mediation, limit-setting, and supportive co-use) may reduce problematic digital engagement [34,35,36,37]. Active mediation (the parent discussing media-related concerns without criticism) and consistent limit-setting appear most effective in childhood and early adolescence, whereas for older adolescents, autonomy-supportive practices and parent–child relationship quality are more strongly associated with healthier digital engagement than rule-based restriction alone [34,35]. However, these practices cannot reasonably counteract environments engineered to leverage reward sensitivity and attentional capture, underscoring the need for structural, regulatory, and safety-by-design approaches.

1.1. The Primacy of a Child’s Right to Development

This review is grounded in the principle that a child’s right to healthy social, neural, and cognitive development must take precedence over other competing rights. These developmental capacities form the foundation for the later exercise of autonomy, expression, participation, and informed decision-making. When digital engagement occurs early, frequently, or without developmentally appropriate support, it has the potential to interfere with the acquisition of core regulatory, social, and cognitive competencies. The following Table 1 outlines key developmental domains and summarises the mechanisms through which digital environments may disrupt, displace, or distort typical developmental trajectories.

1.2. Rethinking the Language of Rights

Children’s rights in digital spaces are typically interpreted through the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). Yet these frameworks were drafted for a generic rights-bearing subject and often assume a level of maturity, stability, and agency that may not reflect children’s evolving capacities, especially in highly engineered, commercialised online environments. Table 2 reframes key UNCRC articles through a developmental lens, highlighting where standard digital-rights framings overlooked age-related needs and vulnerabilities.

While Table 2 reframes selected UNCRC articles through a developmental lens, the underlying right to development itself remains comparatively under-specified in digital-rights debates. Table 3 contrasts a rights-based framing of children’s digital engagement with a developmental framework, highlighting how the right to development is often under-prioritised or only superficially addressed.

1.3. Children’s Agency and Access to Accurate Information

Children are agents in their own digital lives, but meaningful agency depends on access to accurate, evidence-based information. In current debates, the language of digital “benefits” often overstates advantages that are tangential to mental health and can become detrimental when over-relied upon. At the same time, this framing can misconstrue or downplay documented harms. Table 4 illustrates how commonly cited digital “benefits” may be partial, misleading, or contingent on important caveats.

1.4. The Role and Limitations of Digital Literacy Programmes

Digital literacy education is now a central plank of school-based responses to online risk. These programmes aim to equip young people with skills to evaluate digital content, recognise cyberbullying and manipulative design, and make more informed choices about their online behaviour. However, evaluations of widely implemented curricula (e.g., cyberbullying and social media literacy programmes) suggest that gains are often modest, uneven across subgroups, and short-lived, with limited evidence for sustained improvements in behaviour or wellbeing. Evaluations are often based on measures of knowledge from the training. Short program duration, reliance on self-report, insufficient integration into whole-school practice, and minimal involvement of parents or wider community systems all constrain their impact.

While digital literacy must remain part of a multi-layered public health response, it cannot, on its own, safeguard children’s development in commercialised, attention-driven digital environments. Over-reliance on these programmes risks creating a false sense of assurance and shifting responsibility onto children to navigate systems that remain fundamentally misaligned with their developmental needs. Table 5 summarises the intended role of digital literacy initiatives, the key limitations that emerge from current evidence, and the implications for policy and practice.

2. Discussion

Having reviewed the limitations in a “rights” based approach (Table 3) via the vehicles of development (Table 1), agency and digital literacy education (Table 2, Table 3, Table 4 and Table 5), the discussion turns to a theoretical exploration of essential psychological concepts that should underpin a public health approach. This discussion explores the cascading effect of addictive design on self-regulation, modelling, and mental health.

Recognising the Addictive Pull and How It Expands to the Environment

The device functions as a conditioned stimulus: its sensory cues (e.g., vibration, screen illumination) are repeatedly paired with social feedback delivered on variable schedules, strengthening cue-reward associations (i.e., via Pavlovian and operant mechanisms) [144,145]. Over time, the cue alone can elicit physiological arousal, attentional capture, and approach tendencies, much as notification studies show an increase in inattention and urge to check when phones signal or are merely present [146,147]. Additionally, contextual features (e.g., bedrooms, desks, evening hours) acquire associative value that further facilitates engagement [148]. Based on this, the pull to re-engage with devices reflects predictable conditioning and reinforcement processes described in contemporary models of problematic smartphone use, rather than a simple moral failing or lack of willpower. The ‘pull’ expands to bedrooms, homes, and classrooms.

We propose that modern digital environments interact with adolescents’ heightened sensitivity to rewards and social evaluation, reweighting how goals, motivation, and uncertainty are managed [74,76,149]. Social media platforms leverage learned anticipation and peer feedback, encouraging frequent and constant engagement [150,151,152,153].

Contemporary revisions challenge Maslow’s original sequencing of needs, treating belonging as a fundamental, evolutionarily grounded motive rather than a “higher-order” luxury. Baumeister and Leary’s classic need-to-belong account argues that humans strive to form and maintain close bonds with an urgency comparable to basic drives [154], a view echoed in more recent syntheses of belonging and wellbeing [155]. Kenrick et al. likewise restructure Maslow’s pyramid, proposing a dynamic hierarchy in which motives for affiliation and status can be prioritised alongside survival concerns [156].

In device-saturated contexts, these social needs are not only basic but continuously cued. Social platforms repeatedly signal potential gains and losses in inclusion, status, and connection; the need to belong and fear of missing out reliably predict problematic smartphone use, especially among youth high in intolerance of uncertainty [12]. Technology-based social comparison and feedback-seeking prospectively forecast increases in depressive symptoms [9], while young people frequently report using digital media to distract from distress, to seek reassurance, and to meet perceived external standards of perfection [157,158]. Together, these behaviours mark a broader psychological shift toward restlessness, urgency, and diminished tolerance for uncertainty. Tolerance of uncertainty has been shown to protect against the development of social anxiety, panic disorder, and generalised anxiety disorder in adolescence [159]. Avoiding uncertainty drives maladaptive emotion regulation mechanisms. It must be prioritised in prevention efforts that target digital media use. Altering this factor has been shown to have a limited impact on adolescent social media use [92,160,161].

Importantly, the “addictive” pull should be distinguished from clinical addiction, with most cases better framed as conditioned responding and uncertainty-driven checking, even though a non-trivial subset may progress toward genuinely addictive patterns with prevalence varying between 18.5% and 23.3% in reports globally [11,162,163,164]. Acknowledging the ‘addictive pull’ may prompt self-regulation by adults in the home environment. This, in turn, will assist parents in modelling healthy boundaries around technology use. We argue that this information should be provided within public health education. A broad understanding of these concepts will assist leaders (be they educators, librarians, parents, or other decision makers) to design helpful practices and changes to the environments that they oversee. We have already seen initiatives commence within phone-free schools, phone-free restaurants, and phone-free camps. Similarly, tech entrepreneurs are reported to deliberately delay the provision of devices for children. In a world where technology is introduced to children by both schools and parents, it is essential to recognise the harms brought about by the addictive use of technology.

Emerging reviews and policy reports argue that bolstering self-regulation under such continuous stimulation will require coordinated policy, digital-literacy education, and family and school-level practices [45,165,166,167,168].

3. Features Within a Multi-Layered Approach

Recent technological innovations have flourished in a world with a lack of recognition of the adverse developmental impact of their offerings. In this environment, no single intervention or stakeholder acting alone can protect youth mental health. Because digital environments now function as a core social determinant of health with commercial interests driving use, a coordinated, multi-layered response is required [127,169]. The denial of harms to child development, emotion regulation, and community cohesion has prevented the systems around children from leading with thoughtful guidelines. Elements of a multilayered approach which could be considered and trialled are set out below.

(1)Regulation: Developmentally informed regulation might include the following:

• (a)Minimum-age provisions which place the onus on platforms to age-gate entry of users effectively;
• (b)Duty-of-care laws which require platforms to take care to prevent harms experienced from engagement via their platform;
• (c)Safety by design principles which remove the inclusion of likes, comments, streaks, autoplay, pull-to-refresh, recommendation systems, companion chatbots, randomised gaming features (e.g., in-app currencies, reward loops, fortune wheels, pay-to-progress) which aim to engage the user for longer time periods and play on the self-worth of the user; ban advertising for minors;
• (d)Privacy regulation to ensure that data from underage users is not collected;
• (e)Removal of anonymous posting to increase the sense of responsibility towards amplifying emotive content and/or misinformation.

The EU Members of Parliament recommended that senior managers within Technology companies be made personally liable in cases of serious and persistent non-compliance with regulation [170].(2)Adult Education:

• (a)Public health education should recognise the ‘addictive pull’ of portable devices. This will normalise new practices recommended in recommendations 3 and 4.
• (b)Education for prenatal parents to understand the impact of parental and infant technology use in the early years. Parenting education that supports parents with alternative means of managing challenging behaviours in the early years.

(3)Environmental Changes (through either regulation or policy guidelines led by overseeing systems):

• (a)Within Schools: Initiatives spurred on by Australia’s regulation—school guidelines requiring students not travel to or from school with smartphones, boarding school access to phones limited to 30 min per day, removal of QR codes from signs around schools. In the United Kingdom, the Department of Education has released a new phone policy with detailed guidelines, including suggestions for navigating concerns for students with special needs. Notably, computers provide similar communication features, and consideration of initiatives may need to expand to school-enabled devices.
• (b)Within Public Places: device-free playgrounds, libraries, and restaurants. These occur due to the foresight of a council, owner, or board that wishes to support such practices.
• (c)Technology programmes used within school systems should meet a minimum threshold by obtaining an independent agency rating that confirms the absence of gamification elements. Metrics of engagement must be distinguished from metrics that demonstrate genuine learning outcomes.

(4)Secondary Prevention: Professional development for medical practitioners, clinicians, and psychologists to assist them in assessing when device use maintains psychological symptoms. Clinical guidelines for these professionals.(5)Educational initiatives for youth need to address two critical areas.

• (a)Foster digital literacy skills through developmentally attuned messaging to protect against the harms young people may encounter when using the internet. These must be subject to independent evaluation to justify investment of time and resources. Although digital literacy is frequently promoted as a “primary prevention strategy”, without sustained reinforcement, active parental involvement, and broader community engagement, programmes have the potential to be counterproductive if they act as symbolic gestures and do not lead to actual behaviour change. To date, the empirical evidence base shows mixed outcomes. The Safe-Surfing program (covered harassment, passwords, malware, social media) and found only small, short-term, and non-universal improvements [138,139,140]. SoMe (four-session social media literacy program) showed no meaningful behaviour change [143]. Meta-analyses of whole school bullying programmes show approximately a 15% reduction in bullying across schools, leaving many students still targeted after interventions [171].
• (b)Co-design of initiatives that support adolescents to reduce addictive patterns of social media and technology use. With regard to opinions on social media use, in New Zealand, at the end of 2025, 540 youth were surveyed (aged 13 to 17; 61% male). In this survey, 39% of the adolescents stated that they “wish social media had never been invented”. In this group, 47% supported the age restriction of 16 years, 25% opposed an age restriction, while the remainder stated that they did not care. Finally, 32% of teens reported it would be easy to give up social media, but this proportion almost doubled (61%) when teens felt that their friends would give it up as well. These findings highlight the impact of social pressure on the decisions that are being faced [163]. It may be that, as vulnerable groups work through challenges, they explore the benefits of one-to-one or small-group communication with identifiable others rather than relying on large public platforms. Such one-to-one communication may reduce social signalling demands and performative pressures within discussion.
• (c)In changing norms, it may also be helpful to seek leaders in popular culture who endorse the changes and who call out the problems that are seen in youth vulnerabilities being exploited.

Future Directions

Future research should establish a clear framework that first distinguishes meaningful learning and personal productivity from product engagement. Such a framework should weigh these distinctions against the practical benefits of digital use for individuals and peer groups at different developmental stages. Future work should also further explore gender differences pertaining to each developmental area and the harms that children and young adolescents are exposed to via social media. It is timely to frame children’s digital participation within a multi-layered public health approach. This means that every part of the community will work together to accurately recognise harms and put small initiatives in place. The rights-based perspective must recognise key developmental principles set out here. This will ensure that every child’s right to healthy development is protected from addictive social forces that impair emotional, social, and cognitive functioning.