🖥️ UNESCO Online Press Briefing: Growing up in a connected world
A timely guide for parents navigating the complexities of digital life.
🎯 The Main Takeaway
On June 16th, 2026, UNESCO held a global press briefing to address the escalating challenges families face in the digital age, launching a new practical guide designed to help parents navigate their children's online lives. Attended by 40 participants from around the world, the briefing featured a high-profile panel including UNESCO’s Assistant Director-General for Communication and Information, Mariya Gabriel; Chief of Media and Information Literacy, Adeline Hulin; and CLEMI France Assistant Director, Virginie Sassoon. The session highlighted critical data regarding youth exposure to social media, skyrocketing AI usage, and the growing debate over institutional phone bans.
During the first session by Mariya Gabriel, UNESCO’s Assistant Director-General for Communication and Information, there are three numbers that capture the current moment:
Parental Anxiety: Parents worldwide are deeply worried about their children’s excessive screen time.
US AI Companion Surge: In the US, a majority of children have used AI companions completely without their parents’ knowledge, leaving families feeling overwhelmed.
UK Social Media Baseline: In the UK, around 40% of children already have social media profiles operating with minimum control or supervision from their parents.
These alarming trends have sparked concern worldwide, particularly as online crimes targeting children continue to increase.
📵 The Failure of Bans and Age Restrictions
On these platforms, algorithms aggressively amplify harmful content, including cyberbullying, self-harm, and violence. Current age restriction systems fail to stop children from being exposed to this landscape. Bans are not enough because children’s digital lives extend far beyond social media platforms. For instance, 90% of children in Uruguay play on their phones, while 70% on their computer, and there is no big gender gap. This results in severe sleep deprivation and a lack of physical movement.
According to UNESCO, teenagers are adopting AI tools at a massive rate. In the UK, AI usage among teens surged from 37% to 77% in the span of just a single year—entirely without parental guidance. Bans alone cannot solve the issue or protect children; instead, youth need to be empowered, protected, and supported.
Beyond supporting a ban, parents need proactive guidance before giving their children smartphones (such as establishing clear family rules). Furthermore, parents must navigate the era of online influencers by discussing why their children follow certain figures and what information those influencers actually provide.
Read more: Jakarta Future Festival's vision for a connected city and Southeast Asia's gaming showcase at Summer Game Fest.
🚸 Balancing Online and Offline Care
While maintaining a neutral political stance on the issue, UNESCO believes that restrictions and bans cannot replace active digital education. Furthermore, the agency insists that bans should never substitute for “safety by design” standards—which means building technology that naturally protects children by removing features like infinite scrolling and targeted advertising. Bans can, however, serve as leverage to encourage tech platforms to adopt these safety standards. Ultimately, safety shouldn’t rely on platforms alone, it requires collective development.
A major challenge in addressing this issue is the lack of global data. We have a lot of data, but it’s more geographically focused. Addressing this, a large network of experts and practitioners from the global North to the global South mobilized to create a practical book filled with illustrations and key takeaways for families.
The goal is to ensure parents actively manage this aspect of their children’s lives. Parents need to care for their children’s online lives just as much as they care for their offline lives. They must understand the exact digital environments their children experience—how AI companions, algorithms, and tools function—and use the right strategies to engage with them.
While constant surveillance can provide parents with a temporary sense of security, it often feels overly controlling and restrictive to children. The panel emphasized the need to find a healthy, respectful balance between protection and independence.
🗝️ Key Takeaways on Guidance
Shifting from Restrictions to Dialogue
The current generation cannot simply be controlled by rules and restrictions; they require genuine guidance and open dialogue regarding how these platforms function.
Overcoming Parental Misinterpretations
Parents frequently misinterpret what their children are doing online. A youth survey revealed that while parents assume social media is purely for entertainment, children are actually using it to learn English and gain broader knowledge. This highlights why rules without explanation fail, and why open dialogue is essential.
Proactive vs. Reactive Conversations
Data shows that 9 out of 10 children encounter harmful content online, making proactive communication vital. Currently, only 47 percent of parents have conversations with their children before an issue occurs online; the vast majority only talk about digital risks after something bad has already happened.
📚 Does UNESCO plan to push for mandatory media literacy in school curricula?
While the new publication is primarily framed as a parent’s guide, the discussion highlighted a critical need to extend these resources directly to teachers. Attendees questioned whether the guide provides explicit strategies for the classroom, given that teachers are on the front lines of seeing how screen fatigue and digital distraction affect students daily. UNESCO confirmed that adapting these resources for schools is a top priority in the coming weeks. The goal is to build a bridge between home and school environments so that educators and parents are utilizing the same framework when guiding children through digital challenges.
A global survey conducted last year revealed a strong commitment among member states to integrate media and information literacy into school curricula. However, many countries still focus heavily on basic digital skills rather than critical thinking skills, and a large geographic disparity remains.
Recent UNESCO data indicates that more than half the countries in the world already ban the use of mobile phones in schools. While UNESCO does not endorse blanket bans on smartphones in all circumstances, it does support restrictions—including targeted bans—to prevent device use from obstructing learning.
The organization argues that smartphones should only be used in schools when there is a clear, meaningful educational justification. UNESCO hopes to translate these global insights and commitments into concrete, actionable curriculum steps very soon.
💭❓ General Q&A, Technical Guidelines, and Future Actions
📜Language Availability and Public Partnerships
The parent guide is currently available in English, Spanish, and French, with an Arabic version and other languages planned as translation partnerships develop. UNESCO is also partnering with France Télévisions to increase global accessibility.
👩🏫 Involvement of Tech and AI Developers
Tech companies and AI developers are involved in these discussions indirectly. UNESCO maintains specific guidelines that interface with private organizations, technology sectors, and governments to ensure they are held accountable and act as part of the solution.
🧷The Move Toward Default Safe Modes
There is a massive, cross-sector agreement among child development experts that relying entirely on parental configuration settings is an unsustainable safety strategy. Many parents—particularly single parents, working-class families, or those lacking technical literacy—simply do not have the time or specialized knowledge to manage intricate privacy matrices. Therefore, tech platforms must be mandated to implement automatic, default safe modes for users under the age of 18, ensuring that “Safety by Design” is a fixed standard rather than an optional setting.
🏠Why This Hits Home
This isn’t just a summary of global briefing, but a reality check for what’s happening in living rooms right now. The fact that a huge majority of kids are using AI companions without their parents knowing—and that teen AI usage doubled in a single year—proves that technology is moving way faster than standard parenting rules.
The stats on reactive parenting also hit hard. When fewer than half of families discuss online safety before a problem happens. UNESCO’s insights challenge the assumption that kids are just wasting time online, revealing that many are actually trying to learn. It’s a sharp reminder that shielding kids doesn’t come from building higher walls or taking away devices, but from changing how we talk to them about what they see every day.
🛑The Bottom Line
Bans and restrictions are a temporary band-aid on a fast-evolving problem. We simply cannot forbid our way out of online risks. Keeping kids safe requires a real team effort: tech companies must be forced to build automatic “Safety by Design” features so the entire burden doesn’t fall on exhausted parents, schools need to teach critical digital thinking rather than just basic tech skills, and parents have to treat their kids’ online lives with the same proactive care as their offline lives. At the end of the day, the goal isn’t constant surveillance, but open, honest dialogue that gives kids the tools to navigate the digital world safely on their own.
(AKO/ELS)