Introduction
The phone isn’t the argument – but it’s where the argument happens.
Most parents who raise this with me have already had the fight. The phone at the table, the phone at midnight, the phone that comes out the second a conversation gets uncomfortable. They have tried taking it away and lived through the week that followed. The real question most parents end up asking isn’t “how do I take it away”. Rather, “Is this actually harming my child, or am I simply the generation that finds the new thing frightening?”
It’s a fair question, and the honest answer is more interesting than the title suggests.
Australia banned social media for under-16s in December 2025. France followed for under-15s in January 2026. South Africa is now debating its own version, although enforcement here is a genuinely difficult problem, given that most of the major platforms have no legal presence in the country. Whatever is eventually decided, it won’t arrive in time to help you this term.
So the useful question isn’t whether social media is good or bad. It’s what it’s doing to your particular teenager, in your house, and what you can do about that. By the time most parents think to ask, it’s usually been building for a while before anyone noticed.
What the Research Actually Says
Start with the disappointing part. The science is messier than the headlines.
The strongest claim you will read is that screen time causes teenage depression. In that simple form, the evidence doesn’t really support it. One of the longer studies in the field followed 500 young people over eight years and found that the amount of time a teenager spent on social media didn’t predict their anxiety or depression. More hours, no clear effect. Fewer hours, no clear effect.
The experiments, though, point the other way. A meta-analysis of ten randomised controlled trials, covering close to 1,500 participants, found that reducing social media use did lower depressive symptoms. The effect was real but modest. A 2026 trial of young people who already had symptoms of anxiety or depression found that cutting use to roughly an hour a day for three weeks, an average reduction of 78 minutes, brought loneliness down measurably compared with a control group.
Hold those together and you get something more useful than a headline. Hours on their own are a poor predictor. Cutting hours helps, and helps most for the young people who are already struggling. Which tells you the problem was never really the clock.
It Isn’t the Hours – It’s What Happens in Them
Two teenagers can spend the same three hours on a phone and come away in entirely different states. What separates them is what those hours contained.
Comparison
Adolescents are built to work out where they stand. That isn’t vanity, it’s a developmental task. The difficulty is that the measuring stick has changed. A generation ago it was thirty classmates. Now it’s an endless feed, filtered and selected and delivered by an algorithm that has learned precisely which images hold your child’s attention longest.
Your teenager knows the pictures are curated. Knowing doesn’t switch off the feeling. The comparison is running against a highlight reel, all day, in a mind that hasn’t yet built much defence against it.
Displacement
The second mechanism is simpler, and probably larger. Every hour on a phone is an hour not spent doing something else.
Sleep is the first thing to go, and sleep loss on its own produces low mood, poor concentration and a much shorter fuse. After that come the slower losses: the sport that quietly got dropped, the friend who is now only ever a message, the boredom that used to turn into something.
A great deal of what looks like harm caused by social media is really the absence of what it replaced.
Cyberbullying
And then the part that isn’t ambiguous at all.
Playground bullying stopped at the school gate. This doesn’t. It follows a child into their bedroom, it can be anonymous, it’s permanent, and it has an audience.
The South African Picture
We now have local figures, and they don’t make comfortable reading.
A study published this year in the South African Journal of Information Management, by Daniel le Roux of Stellenbosch University and Camryn Twaddle, surveyed pupils across five fee-paying high schools. Nearly two thirds of them, 63.9%, reported involvement in cyberbullying. Heavier use of TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat and other social media platforms was significantly associated with that involvement, and involvement tracked with lower connectedness, lower happiness and weaker academic performance.
The figure worth sitting with, though, is a different one. Of those pupils, 37.3% were both victim and perpetrator. Only 6.7% were purely perpetrators.
That ought to change the conversation at home. Most parents ask whether their child is being bullied. Very few ask the other question, and the data suggests it’s usually the same child. A teenager who is being targeted very often hits back in the same medium, and then carries the shame of both halves.
Separately, work by the Centre for Justice and Crime Prevention has put the proportion of South African learners who have experienced some form of cyberbullying at around four in ten.
Why Adolescence Is the Hardest Time for This
None of this would matter nearly as much at twenty-eight.
Adolescence is the period when the brain is most sensitive to social standing, and when who they are is still being decided. A teenager is doing the work of assembling an identity, and doing it in public, with a running count of who approved.
At the same time, the part of the brain that manages perspective and impulse is still some years from finished. So a comment on a post arrives at full volume, and the machinery an adult would use to put it in proportion isn’t fully installed yet.
Telling them it’s not real doesn’t work. To them, socially, it’s exactly as real as school.
The Teens Who Feel It Most
Some are hit far harder than others.
Girls, consistently, more than boys, and most of all around appearance and belonging.
Teenagers who are already anxious or low. This is the group the trial evidence is clearest about, and it runs in both directions: low mood pulls a teenager further into the phone, and the phone deepens the low mood.
Neurodiverse teens often feel this more sharply. Social rules that already take effort to read become harder still without tone or a face to go on, and rejection sensitivity turns a delayed reply into evidence.
And then, importantly, the teenagers for whom online is a lifeline. A young person who is isolated at school, or who can’t yet talk at home about who they are, may be finding their only real community on a screen. Removing it doesn’t return them to a fuller life. It returns them to an emptier one.
Which is why a blanket ban so often lands hardest on exactly the child who needed the most care.
What Helps at Home
1. Get curious before you get restrictive
Ask what they’re watching, who they follow, what’s funny this week. Not as surveillance. As interest.
A teenager who believes you’re gathering evidence will show you nothing. A teenager who believes you’re interested will eventually show you the thing that upset them, which is generally the only way you find out about it at all.
2. Protect sleep before you police hours
If you change one thing this term, change where the phone sleeps. Out of the bedroom, charging in the kitchen, from an agreed time.
This single boundary does more than any app limit, and it’s easier to hold because it’s about sleep rather than about trust. Buy a cheap alarm clock and you remove the last argument against it.
3. Aim for a floor, not a ceiling
Rather than counting down the hours online, protect the things that need to stay in the week: a sport, a meal together, one activity with people in the room.
Displacement is the mechanism. So defend what is being displaced.
4. Ask the other question
Once, calmly, with no consequence attached to the answer: have you ever been part of it? Not as an accusation. Because the research says it’s likely, and because a teenager carrying that has nowhere at all to put it.
5. Model it
They notice. A parent scrolling through supper while asking a child to put their phone down isn’t making an argument they can win.
What Doesn’t Help, Even Though It Feels Like It Should
Worth naming, because every one of these comes from love.
- Confiscating the phone as punishment for something unrelated. It teaches a teenager that their whole social world is collateral, and it guarantees they hide the next problem.
- Reading everything in secret. The day it’s discovered, and it will be discovered, you lose the reporting line permanently.
- Making the phone the villain of every conversation. It becomes the thing they defend rather than the thing they question.
- The comparison. A cousin who apparently reads, a friend’s child who’s off it entirely. It has never once produced a reader.
- The one big conversation. This works as small, repeated, low-stakes exchanges, or it doesn’t work.
When to Be Concerned
Ordinary teenage phone use is heavy, irritating and largely fine. Watch the changes rather than the volume.
- Withdrawal from friends they used to see in person
- A drop in marks, or in the things they used to care about
- Distress attached to the phone itself: dread before opening it, tears afterwards
- Secrecy that’s new, or a sudden move away from a platform they lived on
- Sleep gone for weeks rather than nights
- Talk of hopelessness, of being a burden, or any self-harm
If your teenager is being targeted, keep the evidence: screenshots, dates, names. Report it to the platform, and to the school, which has a duty to respond even where the conduct happened after hours.
If there’s any talk of not wanting to be here, take it seriously the first time you hear it. SADAG offers free telephonic counselling nationally on 011 234 4837 or 0800 20 50 26, between 8am and 8pm every day, and a 24-hour suicide crisis line on 0800 567 567. Your GP is a reasonable first stop for anything you’re unsure about.
Short of that, you don’t have to wait for something to go badly wrong to ask for help.
How Therapy Helps
Therapy gives a teenager somewhere to say the part they have been managing alone, which with anything online is almost always shame. Shame is the reason they didn’t tell you in the first place.
In sessions, the work usually looks like:
- Making sense of what happened, in a room where nobody is going to react
- Rebuilding a sense of worth that isn’t attached to a number of likes or a place in a group chat
- Practical skills: blocking, reporting, leaving a chat, saying no to the screenshot
- Where they have also caused harm, room to face that without being crushed by it
- Sleep, anxiety and low mood addressed directly, rather than treated as symptoms of a phone
Parents often tell me it helped them too, because the negotiation at home becomes possible again once somebody else is holding the difficult part.
Conclusion
Your teenager is going to grow up with this. There’s no version of the next ten years in which they don’t.
What you’re really building isn’t a rule. It’s the sense that when something goes wrong online, you’re the person they can tell, and that telling you won’t cost them the phone, their privacy, or your good opinion.
I see teenagers and parents in Claremont, and across the southern suburbs from Rondebosch through Kenilworth and Newlands, as well as families all over the country online. The households that come through this well are seldom the ones with the strictest rules. They’re the ones that kept talking.
The phone isn’t the relationship. It’s only where you can see it.
About Me
I am Paula Marais, a registered specialist wellness counsellor based in Claremont, Cape Town. I hold an Honours in Psychology (Unisa) and a Master’s in Creative Writing (UCT), and I am registered with the Association for Supportive Counsellors and Holistic Practitioners (ASCHP).
I see adults, teenagers and children, in person in Claremont and online across South Africa. Online sessions are equally as effective as in-person sessions.
There is no pressure and no judgment. You can reach me at info@paulamaraistherapy.com or on WhatsApp at 072 633 7661.
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