Should a 13-year-old be able to open a social media account on their own?

On September 28, 2026, India’s Supreme Court asked the government to look at exactly that. Reports differ on what the government agreed to, and government sources have since denied reports of any widespread ban on social media for kids under the age of 18. But things can always change.

Whatever happens next, the question isn’t going away, and it matters to anyone who is a parent, plans to be one, or simply cares about the next generation.

What the evidence says

The developing brain. The US National Institute of Mental Health notes that the brain keeps maturing into the mid-to-late 20s, and that the prefrontal cortex, the region behind the forehead responsible for skills like planning, prioritizing and decision-making, is one of the last parts to mature. It adds that teenagers’ focus on peer relationships, combined with that ongoing development, can lead them to weigh social benefits more heavily than possible consequences (National Institute of Mental Health, n.d.).

One study looks at what happens when that stage meets social media. Researchers at UNC Chapel Hill followed adolescents aged 12 to 13 for three years, using brain scans. Those who habitually checked social media, more than 15 times a day, became more sensitive over time to anticipated social rewards and punishments, while those who checked less became less sensitive (Maza et al., 2023). While the researchers are careful about what this shows: it is an association, not proof that social media caused the change, and calls for more research, it is still an interesting finding.

What a US court found about Meta. In 2026, a New Mexico court found that Meta had knowingly designed Instagram and Facebook to be addictive and had failed to act on what it knew about child exploitation on its platforms. The case produced $375 million in penalties in March and a further $567 million in August, about $942 million in total (New Mexico Department of Justice, 2026; PBS NewsHour, 2026a; TechCrunch, 2026).

India’s own Economic Survey. The Economic Survey 2025–26, tabled in Parliament on January 29, 2026, noted that social media addiction is “strongly associated with anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, and cyberbullying stress,” and is highly prevalent among 15-to-24-year-olds, citing multiple Indian and global studies (Press Trust of India, 2026; Ministry of Finance, 2026).

The other side of the ledger. None of this is one-directional. The US Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory raised serious concerns and said there wasn’t enough evidence to call social media safe for young people. It also noted real benefits, such as community and connection for some of them (Office of the U.S. Surgeon General, 2023).

Other countries are already acting

Australia began enforcing a minimum age of 16 for major platforms in December 2025 (Fortune, 2025). Indonesia began enforcing an under-16 restriction on “high-risk” platforms on March 28, 2026, phased in starting with the major platforms (Bernama, 2026). Malaysia has moved to introduce its own under-16 rule under its Online Safety Act (Fortune, 2025). Several other countries are considering similar steps.

Where the real difficulty lies

Deciding on an age limit is one question. Making it work is another, and countries that have tried have run into it.

Age checks come first. Today, platforms largely rely on users declaring their own age, which the court found insufficient under Indian law (The Quint, 2026). Checking age more reliably means collecting more data, which raises privacy questions of its own.

Then there is the law. France passed an under-15 social media law in July 2026, but in August its Constitutional Council struck it down, finding that it limited freedom of expression disproportionately and lacked adequate privacy safeguards. The law never took effect (Library of Congress, 2026; PBS NewsHour, 2026b).

Finally, enforcement. The Supreme Court has indicated that if the government doesn’t act, it may issue directions to platforms itself (Jain, 2026), and any rule will depend on platforms, many of them global companies, actually complying. Young people also tend to find workarounds for any rule that can be bypassed.

If India goes ahead with any version of this, the real challenge will be implementation, along with the political and legal questions that come with it.

What families can do in the meantime

Whatever the law ends up doing, the conversation can start at home, with your children, nieces and nephews, even grandchildren. Ask them what they enjoy about social media, and what else they’d like to spend that time on. You may learn more from their answers than from any headline.

Three books for further reading

• The Teenage Brain by Frances E. Jensen, with Amy Ellis Nutt: a neurologist’s guide to how adolescent brains develop and why teenagers behave as they do.
• Irresistible by Adam Alter: how technology is designed to hold our attention.
• The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt: the best-known argument for delaying smartphones and social media for children. Some researchers dispute how strong the causal evidence is, so it’s worth reading alongside other views.

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References

Bernama. (2026, March 28). Indonesia bans social media use for under-16s as PP Tunas takes effect. Bernama. https://bernama.com/en/news.php?id=2538414

Business Standard. (2026, September 29). Centre to amend IT rules to bar under-18s from social media accounts. https://www.business-standard.com/india-news/centre-to-amend-it-rules-to-bar-under-18s-from-social-media-accounts-126092900418_1.html

Dubey, N., Datta, J., & Balaji, S. (2025). Child’s personal data and privacy: Analysing the draft DPDP rules, 2025. Bar & Bench. https://www.barandbench.com/law-firms/view-point/childs-personal-data-and-privacy-analysing-the-draft-dpdp-rules-2025

Fortune. (2025, December 9). Australia will start banning kids from social media this week, and Malaysia is getting ready to do the same. https://fortune.com/2025/12/09/australia-will-start-banning-kids-from-social-media-this-week-and-malaysia-is-getting-ready-to-do-the-same/

Jain, D. (2026, September 28). Make rules to regulate children’s social media usage: Supreme Court tells Centre. LiveLaw. https://www.livelaw.in/top-stories/supreme-court-pil-against-minor-children-access-to-social-media-sc-says-may-issue-directions-against-social-media-intermediaries-safe-harbor-immunity-552127

Lakshmikumaran & Sridharan Attorneys. (2025). Digital Personal Data Protection Rules. https://www.lkslaw.com/insights/articles/article-1

Library of Congress. (2026, September 16). France: Constitutional Council rules against the ban on social media for children under 15. Global Legal Monitor. https://www.loc.gov/item/global-legal-monitor/2026-09-16/france-constitutional-council-rules-against-the-ban-on-social-media-for-children-under-15/

Maza, M. T., Fox, K. A., Kwon, S.-J., Flannery, J. E., Lindquist, K. A., Prinstein, M. J., & Telzer, E. H. (2023). Association of habitual checking behaviors on social media with longitudinal functional brain development. JAMA Pediatrics. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/article-abstract/2799812

Ministry of Finance, Government of India. (2026, January 29). Economic Survey 2025–26. https://www.indiabudget.gov.in/

National Institute of Mental Health. (n.d.). The teen brain: 7 things to know. https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/the-teen-brain-7-things-to-know

New Mexico Department of Justice. (2026). New Mexico Department of Justice wins landmark verdict against Meta [Press release]. https://nmdoj.gov/press-release/new-mexico-department-of-justice-wins-landmark-verdict-against-meta/

Office of the U.S. Surgeon General. (2023). Social media and youth mental health: The U.S. Surgeon General’s advisory. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. https://www.hhs.gov/surgeongeneral/reports-and-publications/youth-mental-health/social-media/index.html

PBS NewsHour. (2026a, August 7). New Mexico court orders Meta to pay $567 million over mental health harms to kids online. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/new-mexico-court-orders-meta-to-pay-567-million-over-mental-health-harms-to-kids-online

PBS NewsHour. (2026b). France’s top court blocks under-15 social media ban, citing constitutional freedoms. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/frances-top-court-blocks-under-15-social-media-ban-citing-constitutional-freedoms

Press Trust of India. (2026, January 29). Make platforms enforce age verification to curb digital addiction: Economic Survey. Upstox. https://upstox.com/news/business-news/latest-updates/make-platforms-enforce-age-verification-to-curb-digital-addiction-economic-survey/article-188531/

South Carolina Attorney General’s Office. (n.d.). At what age can my child use social media? Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force. https://www.scag.gov/internet-crimes-against-children/blog/at-what-age-can-my-child-use-social-media/

TechCrunch. (2026, August 7). New Mexico court orders Meta to pay additional $567M in child safety case. https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/07/new-mexico-court-orders-meta-to-pay-additional-567m-in-child-safety-case/

The Logical Indian. (2026). Supreme Court pushes Centre for 18-year age bar on social media accounts, citing minors’ inability to enter contracts. https://thelogicalindian.com/?p=128796

The New Indian Express. (2026, September 30). Government denies plans to curb social media access for under-18s. https://www.newindianexpress.com/india/2026/Sep/30/government-denies-plans-to-curb-social-media-access-for-under-18s

The Quint. (2026). Centre supports Supreme Court move to legally bar minors from social media. https://www.thequint.com/news/breaking-news/supreme-court-centre-bar-minors-social-media

What are the three things you wish you’d been taught at school — things that could have changed your life, had you known about them sooner?

I’ve been sitting with that question for a while now. And for me, the answer keeps coming back to the same three things, none of which showed up anywhere in my actual education.

One: The life of Swami Vivekananda, and Karma Yoga

I came across Swami Vivekananda at a point in my life when I was genuinely struggling to figure out what I was meant to do with it.

Vivekananda was born Narendranath Datta in Calcutta in January 1863. He became a disciple of the sage Ramakrishna, and in 1893 he travelled to the United States to speak at the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago, where his opening address made him something of an overnight sensation in the West. Over the next four years he lectured across America and England, and in the winter of 1895–96, working out of a rented room on West 39th Street in New York, he delivered a series of talks that a stenographer named Joseph Josiah Goodwin transcribed and published as Karma Yoga in February 1896. He returned to India in 1897, founded the Ramakrishna Mission that same year, and died in 1902 at just 39.

Karma Yoga is, at its heart, about work — but not work in the way we usually think about it. Vivekananda’s argument, drawing on the Bhagavad Gita’s famous instruction that a person has a right to their actions but never to the fruits of those actions (Gita 2.47), was that the quality of a life isn’t measured by outcomes achieved but by the spirit in which the work itself is done. Do the work fully. Release your grip on how it turns out. That’s the discipline.

I won’t pretend I fully live this. But encountering that idea — that your worth isn’t contingent on results you can’t fully control — gave me something I hadn’t found anywhere else at that point: a sense of purpose that didn’t collapse every time an outcome didn’t go my way.

And here’s what stays with me: for a thinker this central to modern Indian thought — someone whose birthday is marked as National Youth Day, whose Chicago address is still taught in comparative religion courses around the world — he was barely a footnote in my own school textbooks.

Two: Swabhava and Swadharma

The second thing comes from the Bhagavad Gita as well, from its eighteenth chapter.

Swabhava is your intrinsic nature — the particular mix of temperament, inclination, and aptitude you were built with. Swadharma is the duty, the role, the path that flows naturally from that nature. Not the path someone else thinks you should take. Not the path that looks most impressive. The one that actually fits who you are.

The Gita is remarkably direct about this. In chapter 18, verse 47, Krishna tells Arjuna that it is better to imperfectly follow one’s own dharma than to perfectly imitate someone else’s — and that acting in accordance with your own nature carries no fault, even when it’s flawed (a related formulation appears earlier too, in 3.35). A few verses earlier, in 18.41 through 18.44, the text describes how different temperaments naturally incline toward different kinds of work — not as a rigid caste prescription to be read literally in the modern world, but as a genuinely useful idea underneath it: people are wired differently, and trying to force everyone through the same narrow definition of success is a category error.

I think about how much of modern education — and modern career advice — runs in the opposite direction. Pick the prestigious path. Follow the template. Optimize for the outcome everyone agrees is impressive. Almost none of it starts from the question the Gita starts from: what is your actual nature, and what work genuinely flows from it?

I don’t think this is a minor idea. I think it’s one of the most important things a young person could be taught — early, and taught well — before a decade of external pressure teaches them to ignore their own nature entirely. It deserves to be central to how we think about education, not a footnote in a philosophy elective nobody takes.

Three: Meditation

The third thing is meditation — and I mean the plain, undramatic version of it, not the version that gets caricatured. Not sitting cross-legged, chanting, performing serenity. Just the practice of noticing where your mind has gone, and gently bringing it back to the present moment. Again. And again. And again.

This isn’t just a spiritual claim anymore — it’s a reasonably well-studied one. A review of the research by the American Psychological Association found that mindfulness-based approaches show real, measurable effects on reducing stress, anxiety, and depression, and that mindfulness-based cognitive therapy in particular has shown significant success in reducing relapse for people with recurrent depression (American Psychological Association, 2019).

But for me, the case for it isn’t really the research. It’s that meditation carried me through some of the hardest points in my life — points where very little else did. Not by making the difficulty disappear, but by giving me a way to be present with my own mind without being at its mercy. That’s a skill. Like any skill, it can be taught. And like most genuinely useful skills, it wasn’t taught to me until I went looking for it myself, well into adulthood.

Why this matters

None of these three things were part of my formal education. All three shaped my life more than most of what was.

I don’t think this is a coincidence, and I don’t think it’s unique to me. A curriculum built entirely around measurable outcomes — grades, ranks, placements — will always struggle to make room for ideas like these, because none of them are easily testable. But “easily testable” and “actually important” have never been the same thing.

If I had to make one argument today, it would be this: alongside the syllabus, there is a case for teaching people who they are, what they’re actually suited for, and how to sit with their own minds. Those aren’t soft add-ons to a real education. For a lot of us, they end up being the entire foundation everything else stands on.

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References

American Psychological Association. (2019, October 30). Mindfulness meditation: A research-proven way to reduce stress. https://www.apa.org/topics/mindfulness/meditation

Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 2, Verse 47; Chapter 3, Verse 35; Chapter 18, Verses 41–44, 47.

Vivekananda, S. (1896). Karma Yoga. Longmans, Green, and Co. (Lectures delivered New York, December 1895–January 1896; transcribed by Joseph Josiah Goodwin.)