France moves to limit screens for children – but are schools going the other way?

Until very recently, my son’s playdates generally kicked off by comparing sketches of trains being blasted into space. Then, one Saturday, they didn’t. His friend instead pulled out a phone and began badgering me for the Wi-Fi code.

Adieu the anorak, analogue days of intergalactic TGV masterplans. Next stop: gameplay videos on YouTube, a Roblox rabbithole, and the infinite high-octane circles of Forza hell. 

Granted, we’re not quite there yet. Most friends’ visits stay well within the neophobe-parent’s comfort zone: Lego, trampoline and mildly tormenting the guinea pig. But there are other portents of a digital avalanche all around. 

I used to think French children were roughly five years behind the US and UK when it came to screen uptake. Now we’ve almost reached parity. 

The government is making some effort to keep kids IRL. Since July 2025, it has been forbidden to expose toddlers to screens in nurseries and daycare centres. And in January, MPs backed a law to ban under-15s from using social media. In this it follows Australia, which outlawed TikTok et al for under-16s last December.

My son’s cousin, also eight, lives in Darwin. Her mother broadly welcomed the ban but says that while it looks laudable, the reality is much messier. 

Bypassing restrictions is relatively straightforward, and against the continued backdrop of twice-weekly ‘digital technology’ lessons at school – where students are taught video editing skills and app navigation from primary age – the legislation seems oddly contradictory.

In her daughter’s class, screens support virtually the whole curriculum. Kids have individual logins to access ‘Mathletics’, an online mathematics learning platform widely used in Australian schools, and to access online reading and a ‘homework matrix’, where tasks (including a lovely prompt to wash up after dinner) are not complete unless photo proof is uploaded. 

A science experiment to grow a plant from seed saw the class paired up so one could film, the other narrate, and both soundtrack the footage after. Creative writing is also on a computer. 

‘Brain breaks’ throughout the day simply shift attention to a larger screen, where dance videos play out at disco volume. 

Granted, this all sounds a whole lot of fun. But isn’t it also dispiriting that the magic of germination is now taught through the prism of an unboxing video, that millennia-old storytelling traditions are not complete without GIFs attached?

French schools are often criticised for their rigidity, but I am immensely thankful that technology in my son’s class is limited to a 20-minute weekly news podcast; that reading is with real books; that maths still has its times-table litanies; that avocados are planted offline and ‘gaming’ is Scrabble-adjacent and against the oldies at the local Ehpad.

This will not last unless the state moves to protect it with the same zeal it shows for military defence. I keep reading about nuclear warheads, ‘forward deterrence’ plans. 

Show me, much rather, the blueprint for an Iron Dome of impregnable legislation over classrooms to shield children from the tech bros just a little bit longer. 

Parents are trying to hold out as best they can at home. If schools start lowering the drawbridge, I worry my son, like his friend, will stop colouring skies full of SNCF rolling stock and simply ask ChatGPT to imagine it for him.