The Finnish National Agency for Education and the Institute for Health and Welfare (THL) recently issued a joint release, clearly regulating the age and time for children's extracurricular use of digital devices, stating that children under 13 should not own personal smartphones and should not use social media services.
Finland's official recommendation is to set a daily screen time limit for children according to their age: children under 2 years old are not recommended to have any screen time at all; 2 to 5 years old, a maximum of 1 hour per day; 6 to 10 years old, also limited to 1 hour per day; ages 11 to 13, increased to 2 hours per day. The recommendation does not include time needed for schoolwork and emphasizes that parents should actively intervene and manage usage when necessary.
Whether the content is age-appropriate is also a key point. The regulation requires that the digital content children are exposed to must be suitable for their age and contribute to their development. This includes games, TV programs, and videos, all of which should strictly adhere to age ratings to prevent children from accessing harmful content.
Compared to the draft released last October, the official version of the recommendation is even more stringent. In addition to prohibiting social media use, it newly adds a clause advising against owning smartphones. The government publicly solicited opinions last autumn and received more than 6,000 responses from parents, most of whom supported stricter regulation, prompting officials to revise the content.
Associate Professor of Adolescent Medicine, Kosola, bluntly stated that giving a child a phone too early is tantamount to conducting an uncontrolled human experiment.