European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said the Commission will bring forward a proposal on restricting children's access to social media "after the summer," following the release of a Commission-backed report on child safety online Engadget. The report was authored by child psychologist Dr. Jörg M. Fegert and epidemiologist Dr. Maria Melchior.

The study found that children in Europe spend four to six hours per day on social media, and that almost 60 percent of European children experienced socio-emotional development issues linked to that use, including sleep and concentration problems and elevated rates of depression and anxiety Engadget. The authors recommend restricting access for children under 13 unless supervised by a parent or teacher, limiting teens aged 13 to 18 to platforms carrying safety features such as caps on infinite scrolling, and barring screen access entirely for children under three.

Von der Leyen's press conference did not commit the Commission to a specific legislative instrument, only to reviewing the report and recommendations before presenting a formal proposal after the summer break Engadget. That timeline places any concrete text likely in the autumn, and it follows months of internal groundwork: the Commission convened a Special Panel on child safety online, which held its first meeting in March 2026 and addressed both general online safety and potential age restrictions for social media European Commission. The panel's final meeting took place on 16 June 2026, alongside a Eurobarometer survey the Commission says confirmed a link between social media use and wellbeing Digital Strategy.

Some member-state action has already outpaced Brussels. A Child Protection Code entered into force on 1 June 2026, restricting access for users under 16 to certain social media services European Parliament. French-speaking Belgium is separately weighing a ban on social media use for under-15s Better Internet for Kids. The European Parliament think tank notes that UNICEF, as of March 2026, counted nearly 40 countries worldwide discussing, proposing, adopting or implementing age-based restrictions on social media European Parliament.

The EU would not be first to legislate here. Australia introduced the world's first social media ban for children under 16 in December 2025 RTÉ. Florida implemented a narrower rule in 2024, barring social media use for children under 14 without parental approval. France, Germany and Spain are among the nations reported to be examining their own restrictions, alongside the EU-level effort Engadget.

Any EU-wide age-gating regime would sit awkwardly against the bloc's existing regulatory architecture. The Digital Services Act already imposes risk-assessment and mitigation duties on "very large online platforms," and age verification has been treated there as one mitigation tool among several rather than a standalone fix. An analysis published by Interface in May, "Social Media Age Gating in the EU," concluded that a ban or age-verification regime on its own will not resolve the underlying online child protection risks Interface. That view lines up with a familiar critique of age-gating proposals generally: verification systems tend to be circumvented by younger users through false birthdates or borrowed credentials, and platforms optimized for engagement retain the same design incentives regardless of who is nominally allowed on them.

Worth flagging: the harder engineering and policy question is not whether the EU can legally bar under-13s from platforms, but how it verifies age without building a parallel identity-and-surveillance infrastructure that itself carries privacy risk for minors and adults alike. Digital ID wallets, device-level age signals, and app-store-level attestation have all been floated in adjacent EU digital identity work, and any Commission proposal will need to reconcile age assurance with GDPR's minimization principles. None of the current documentation indicates which technical approach the Commission favors.

The scale of adoption complicates any restriction further. Platforms have spent a decade optimizing engagement loops — autoplay, infinite scroll, notification cadence — precisely because those mechanics work, on adults as much as children. A rule capping under-18 exposure to platforms with "safety features" limiting infinite scrolling implicitly concedes that the default product design is the problem, not merely the age of the user. Legislators focused on age thresholds may be treating a symptom while leaving the underlying interface incentives untouched, which is the core objection raised in the Interface analysis.

In this author's view, having watched two children move from dial-up chat rooms to algorithmic feeds over the past two decades, the pattern in this data is not surprising: usage volume and reported psychological strain tend to move together, and regulators reliably arrive at the "restrict access" lever well after the design choices driving that volume are already deeply entrenched in product roadmaps. What happens after the summer will indicate whether Brussels is prepared to legislate platform design constraints alongside age thresholds, or whether it settles for the more politically tractable route of restricting who gets in the door.