Last summer, a few families on our street threw a pool party for the kids. It was perfect — the good food, the games, an ice cream truck. Kids were happy, running around and splashing in the pool. The phones were banned.
Nobody missed them. The kids swam and ate and chased each other until the dark, and not once did anyone ask for screens because there was something better in front of them. It was the kind of afternoon every parent pictures when they imagine childhood done right.
Then it ended. And nothing changed.
The next day the street was empty again. We live in a quiet, safe neighbourhood with little traffic, so outdoor play is easy, but we still rarely see kids. The party had proven that the kids didn’t need their phones to connect. But it made no difference.
Governments around the world respond to the mental health epidemic correlated with the increase in social media use.
The Canadian government introduced Bill C-34 Safe Social Media Act, which would ban children under 16 from social media. The bill proposes a government regulator in charge of current and future policies. Social media providers must change their code to implement safety by design. Platforms can earn access back by providing evidence that their service is safe for children.
It is a formidable attempt to force companies to fix problems and make it future-proof. It is a smarter law than the one enacted by Australia, where under-16s were barred from holding social media accounts.
But the bill rests on one assumption: that social media is design is the disease.
I am a child psychiatrist and I think design is a symptoms. The true disease could be seen on my street the morning after the party. The ban may not even succeed.
In the previous article “The Second and a Half”, I wrote why a social media ban cannot work. The age limits on cigarettes and alcohol hold because a clerk has to place a physical object into a child’s hand, but a social media feed has neither clerk nor object. The latest Australian data, reflecting the world’s first ban of its kind, shows that 82% of under-16s remain on the prohibited platforms, only 4 percentage-point drop from the initial 86%.
Here is what that means for the bill. The restrictions cannot work if children are back on the platforms because the companies face no real pressure. The commission that is supposed to implement and enforce it will be staffed with ordinary bureaucrats. They will have to take a stand up to the absolute best engineers in the industry with compensation approaching seven figures.
Setting enforcement aside, suppose the ban worked perfectly, suppose every child under sixteen vanished from social media tomorrow.
Would they go outside?
According to our pool party experiment, the answer is no. The kids will disappear into private servers, video games, and online betting. The warm, responsive, always-available AI companions will fill the va. In my earlier piece (She Never Has a Bad Day), I imagined how a lonely child might wander into a private server that looks like a thriving community. But it is a trap filled with bots keeping it lively around the clock, waiting. That is where the most isolated kids go when the front door closes. The ban blocks the kids. It does not hand them back a childhood.
Something was lost even before the phones arrived.
The Village
For most of our species’ history children were raised by a village — not by a couple of exhausted adults. Grandparents, aunts, neighbours, the man who fixed things, the woman who knew the plants, older kids causing trouble. Anthropologists who study hunter-gatherer societies counted about three dozen adults surrounding children.
Children learn by watching competent adults do real things and copying them. The blacksmith’s nephew picks up a hammer because he watched his uncle swing one at iron. The point of having many adults around was that children could build maps of their future.
Now count the present adults in a modern child’s typical day, those doing visible, meaningful work. The number is close to zero. The child does not even see their parents clearly because we are on screens too, looking down. When the adults are silent with their faces lit blue, the child chooses the same rectangle that captured the grown-ups.
The phone did not pull children out of a thriving village. It filled the vacuum where the village once was.
That is why the pool party changed nothing. Connection is not an event. It is an infrastructure that gives enough for a child to feel that they grows up in community of people. We organized the party, but we could not make it last, because two parents cannot be a village.
Here is what the missing village looks like inside one family.
A while ago my son decided, entirely on his own, to learn woodworking. He bought a few used tools off Kijiji, hauled home pallets and scrap to practice on, to build himself a work table.
He never started the power tools. He was unsure, a little afraid of them, and there was no one to show him. I feel I failed him because I’m a psychiatrist, not a carpenter. And there was no one else: no uncle in a workshop down the road, no neighbour with a garage full of tools. The motivation was there, but the village was not. The tools are still in the garage.
I get it. I grew up making things. I learned simple electronics, built my own radios from parts. Ironically, my first job as an immigrant was at Radio Shack. By the time I got there, they had nearly stopped selling parts. Slick devices replaced homemade radios and the hands-on learning that came with them. The path I walked as a kid was gone.
The job at Radio Shack paid $11/hour including bonuses, so for years I had to get up at 7am four times a year to fight other parents for subsidized spots in community centres for swimming or karate. Most spots were gone within 10 min and I think it is still the case. Parents often commute 30 min or more to these activities.
I’m a physician now. I spend thousands of dollars a year on my kids — private music, art, sport. I can afford to Uber them. I have the resources to enrich my kids’ childhoods.
But I cannot buy them a woodworking shop. It does not exist.
The shop is not the main point. It is the people, the role models. Passionate people who chose to be there, not teachers of a structured curriculum. Spending a day with the master who guides kids through making their own products gives them something they miss now – a chance to experience how the master does her work, how she deals with frustrations and her own mistakes.
We cannot restore the village, but we can bring back meaningful role models.
A great article highlighting something we often forget: it takes a village to raise a child.
Today, that village seems to be disappearing. Families, neighbours, friends, and communities are more disconnected than ever. Children need more than just parents—they need a community around them to guide, support, encourage, and care for them.
We need to rebuild the village!