For parents and carers
Why platforms set the age limits they do
Most social apps say 13. Almost nobody actually knows why, and fewer still know what that number is really protecting against. Here's where the figure comes from, and what to focus on instead of the number itself.
Where 13 actually comes from
The minimum age on most major platforms traces back to a US children's privacy law from the late 1990s, which restricts collecting personal data from children under 13 without a parent's consent. Platforms found it simpler to ban under-13s outright than to build separate data handling for them, and that threshold spread globally, UK platforms included, as a side effect of US law rather than a UK safety judgement.
Worth knowing plainly: 13 is a data-protection floor, not a considered opinion about when a child is ready for social media. Nothing about turning 13 changes what a platform can actually expose a child to.
The gap between the rule and real life
Age checks on signup are usually just a date-of-birth field, easy for a child to type around, so plenty of children are on these platforms well before 13. Banning an account after the fact rarely undoes the underlying interest; it just pushes it to a second account or a different app.
This curriculum's own screen-time guidance (see the public screen time guide) points to age 12 as a general guideline for social media specifically, which is close to the platforms' own number but arrived at from child development research, not data-protection law.
What most platforms now offer for younger teens
In recent years, several major platforms have introduced separate under-18 or teen account experiences: more restricted default privacy settings, limits on who can message a young account, and reduced ad targeting. These settings vary by platform and change fairly often, so the useful habit is checking a platform's own safety centre together with your child before agreeing to an account, rather than relying on memory of how it used to work.
What actually matters more than the number
A 13 year old with an involved adult who talks to them regularly about what they see and who they talk to is in a meaningfully different position from an 11 year old with no oversight at all, even though the second child is technically under the platform's own rule. The age a child starts matters less than whether an adult stays part of the conversation once they have.
If you're deciding whether your child is ready, a more useful question than "are they old enough" is "do we already talk about what happens on their other apps." If the answer is yes, a new platform is one more thing to fold into that habit. If the answer is no, that's worth building first.
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