In most homes today, the most familiar argument between parents and children is about screen time. Put the phone away, stop scrolling, you have been online long enough. These concerns are entirely reasonable, but they also show how deeply we have come to treat children’s digital safety as a matter of individual behaviour. When a child spends too long online, we ask the parent to restrict access. When the child comes across harmful material, we advise closer supervision. And when something goes wrong on social media, we return to the same question: why was the child on the platform in the first place?
That approach is no longer sufficient. Children today use digital platforms for education, entertainment, friendship, information and creative expression, and the Government has recognised both sides of this reality. In a recent parliamentary response, the Ministry of Women and Child Development acknowledged the considerable benefits that digital technologies offer children, while also identifying risks such as cyberbullying, online abuse, harmful content, excessive screen time and digital dependency. The policy question, therefore, cannot be reduced to whether children should be online at all. The more useful question is what a digital platform owes a child who is already on it.
The debate is moving beyond screen time
Recent litigation involving Meta in the United States has once again drawn attention to how social media platforms are designed. In one ongoing case, several American states have alleged that certain features of Facebook and Instagram encouraged compulsive use among younger users. Meta disputes these allegations and points to the teen safety measures it has introduced over the years. Whatever the outcome of individual cases, the larger question they raise deserves serious attention in India as well.
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For years, our debate on children’s internet use has centred on the hours a child spends on a device. Time certainly matters, particularly when excessive use begins to affect sleep, studies, physical activity or family life. Yet two children spending the same hour online can have entirely different experiences. One may be watching an educational video or talking to classmates, while the other faces unwanted messages from strangers, aggressive recommendations, disturbing content or advertising built around his or her behaviour. A clock cannot distinguish between the two, which is why screen time can serve as one indicator of digital well-being but cannot carry the whole weight of child safety policy.
India already has a strong foundation
India is not starting from a regulatory vacuum. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 contains significant protections for children. It requires verifiable parental consent before a child’s personal data is processed, prohibits processing that is likely to harm a child’s well-being, and restricts tracking, behavioural monitoring and targeted advertising directed at children. The Digital Personal Data Protection Rules, 2025 have carried this forward by laying down the mechanisms for verifiable parental consent. Around these sit the Information Technology Act, the intermediary rules, cybercrime reporting systems, NCPCR guidance and cyber safety initiatives in schools.
This is substantial progress. The natural next stage is to translate these legal protections into something that parents and children can actually experience while using a platform, which means moving steadily from child protection in law to child safety by design.
What safety by design would mean
This need not involve another elaborate regulatory structure. A basic child digital safety standard could rest on a single principle: when a platform knows that its user is a child, the safest reasonable settings should apply by default, rather than remain hidden in menus for a parent to discover later.
Privacy offers the clearest example. An adult can make an informed choice about keeping a profile public, but a young teenager may not fully grasp what publicly visible photographs, location details or personal information can lead to, so a child’s account should simply begin with stronger privacy settings. The same logic applies to contact from strangers, since there is no reason an unknown adult’s ability to approach a child should work exactly as it does between two adult users. It applies to recommendation systems, which should not treat a young user’s repeated exposure to disturbing content as a request for more of it. And it applies to notifications, because keeping a school-going child engaged late into the night is not the same as sending a business alert to an adult. None of this pushes children out of the digital world; it only recognises that childhood deserves different design assumptions.
Make reporting easy for a child
Design matters just as much when something goes wrong. Grievance mechanisms are usually built by adults, for adults, and they make far less sense to a frightened thirteen-year-old. A child facing cyberbullying, impersonation, threatening messages or unwanted contact should not have to work through a maze of menus before finding help. Reporting tools for minors should be visible, simple and written in language a child can actually understand.
The response matters equally. When a serious complaint concerning a child is made, the platform should preserve the relevant evidence, restrict further harmful contact where appropriate, inform the user of the action taken and support escalation through legal channels where required. India already has the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal, with a particular focus on crimes against women and children, and the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre to support coordinated law enforcement. The administrative opportunity now is to shorten the journey from a harmful online experience to real help.
Parents cannot carry the entire burden
None of this dilutes parental responsibility. Parents remain central to helping children develop judgment, discipline and a healthy relationship with technology, and schools have an equally important role in teaching cyber safety and digital citizenship. NCPCR, CBSE and NCERT have already developed resources and programmes in this area, and capacity building for school administrators and teachers is continuing.
Even so, supervision alone has practical limits. Many children understand particular applications better than their parents do, and technology changes faster than any household can track. No parent can reasonably be expected to master every recommendation system, privacy setting, disappearing message, gaming interaction or new digital trend a child encounters. Nor do we approach children’s physical safety this way. We teach children to cross roads carefully, yet we still build traffic signals and pedestrian crossings. Parents teach road sense, yet vehicles must still meet safety standards. Schools encourage healthy habits, while food and medicines remain subject to standards matched to their risks. The digital environment can increasingly follow the same principle, with education and supervision on one side and safe design on the other.
A standard need not become a ban
There is equally good reason to be wary of solutions built entirely on prohibition. The internet is now woven into education, communication and opportunity, and the digital skills a child develops today will shape access to higher education and employment tomorrow. The objective should be neither unrestricted access nor indiscriminate exclusion, but age-appropriate access: a framework that lets children benefit from technology while reducing the risks they are not yet equipped to assess. This also keeps regulation proportionate, since different services carry different levels of risk and an educational application need not be treated like an open social network. What should remain constant is the emphasis on outcomes, namely privacy, age-appropriate interaction, protection from exploitative commercial practices, accessible reporting and responsible platform design.
From digital literacy to digital responsibility
For years, our response to online risk has understandably focused on teaching citizens how to behave safely on the internet. That remains important, but a mature digital society also asks whether the systems its citizens use behave responsibly towards them. India’s digital transformation has carried technology into almost every corner of daily life, and as it deepens, the conversation will shift from access to trust, and from connectivity to the quality of the digital experience. Children should be at the centre of that shift.
The true test of a child-friendly digital ecosystem is not how many hours a child spends looking at a screen, but what happens during those hours: the choices the technology makes on the child’s behalf, the safeguards that appear on their own, and how quickly help arrives when something goes wrong. Parents will continue to tell children when it is time to put the phone down. Public policy must ask what happens before they do.
About The Author – (Dr Abdul Khabir is a member of the Jammu and Kashmir Administrative Service and currently serves as Deputy Director, Tribal Affairs Department, with additional charge as Nodal Officer, Tribal Research Institute, Government of Jammu and Kashmir.)
Disclaimer – (The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Indian Masterminds. For feedback or queries, please write to [email protected].)
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