You open an app to check one thing. Several videos later, the thing you came for has become a historical detail. The usual advice is to exercise more self-control. The app, meanwhile, carries on doing exactly what it was designed to do.
That’s why I’m interested in who gets asked to change. This week, Australia proposed putting more responsibility on online services. Researchers also examined sleep and screen use, and asked how often children get a say in decisions made about them.
Government and policy · Responsibility by design
On 20 October, the Australian Government announced that it had introduced a digital duty of care bill. The proposal would require minimum safety standards across services including social media, games and AI chatbots. It would also give social media users a choice between algorithmically recommended content and posts from accounts they follow. [1]
Choosing what appears in your own feed sounds a fairly modest ambition. It would give users a say in a system that otherwise makes that choice for them. The bill proposes that change; introducing legislation is not the same as delivering it.
Research · What gets pushed past bedtime?
A US study published on 19 October analysed parent-reported data for 58,881 children and adolescents aged 6 to 17. Greater recreational weekday screen time was associated with lower odds of getting adequate sleep. Schoolwork was excluded from its screen-time measure. [2]
Bedtime is a more concrete place to start than another argument about whether screens are good or bad. What gets pushed later when we keep watching?
The study cannot tell us which factor caused the other. It measured screen use and sleep at one point in time, using parents’ reports, and its analysed sample included White, Black and Hispanic children. We should not extend those results to every group, or turn an association into a causal verdict.
Something encouraging · Children’s voices belong here too
A scoping review published on 23 October examined 53 studies of parental approaches to children’s digital lives. Only seven directly addressed children’s rights. The authors call for more direct engagement with children, alongside open communication within families. [3]
We spend plenty of time discussing what children should do online. Asking them about it seems overdue. The review identifies a gap in the research, rather than a parenting formula, but the gap is revealing: adults’ decisions get studied more often than children’s rights.
Worth your attention · A different story about teens and tech
Candice Odgers’s TED2026 talk, What we’re getting wrong about teens and tech, takes on the familiar claim that smartphones explain the youth mental-health crisis. The developmental psychologist asks what the evidence actually supports (a question that gets less airtime than the crisis). This is an earlier talk, included as further viewing. [4]
Back to that app. We can ask people to manage their habits and ask companies to account for their design. Why should the person holding the phone be the only one expected to change?
Sources and further reading
[1] Australian Government · Digital duty of care bill introduced · 20 October 2026
[2] González, Chapa & Basch · Association of daily screen time with adequate sleep · 19 October 2026
[3] Mukherjee and colleagues · Children’s digital rights and parental mediation: scoping review · 23 October 2026
[4] TED · Candice Odgers · What we’re getting wrong about teens and tech · TED2026, April 2026