Last week the government announced that social media platforms will be banned for under-16s from spring 2027. The intention is clear and, on the surface, hard to argue with: give kids their childhoods back, more time for play, less time scrolling. Parents are exhausted. Tech companies have dragged their feet for years. Something had to give.

But good intentions don’t automatically make good policy. And the word that keeps coming to mind, as someone building a children’s app in this exact environment, is friction. The exhausting, cumulative kind of friction that makes everything harder than it needs to be — for parents trying to do the right thing, and for the small number of us actually trying to build better digital spaces.

The friction we’re forced to build into the good stuff

At Imaginory we’re creating a safe, story-rich space where children (especially reluctant and dyslexic readers) can meet words through play, voice, and wonder. It’s the opposite of the algorithmic feed. It’s slow, intentional, parent-shaped.

Even here, the regulatory and platform pressure introduces friction we didn’t ask for. Double log-ins. Safety-signal systems that are difficult to make granular. The practical difficulty of properly logging and safeguarding the kinds of conversations that happen in a converstion-driven story app, without turning the whole experience into something clunky and surveillance-like.

We want to do and are doing the right thing, but the environment keeps adding steps, checks, and compromises that make the experience less joyful for the very children we’re trying to serve. And we’re the friendly ones! Imagine what this does to everyone else.

That’s why we added the parent approval layer when writing stories together. It’s one small attempt to reduce friction while still giving families genuine oversight — nothing gets published without a parent saying yes. It’s a tiny practical step toward the kind of digital space that (hopefully) doesn’t add to the exhaustion.

The everyday friction that actually shapes childhood

This isn’t just a problem for app builders. It’s the air parents and children breathe.

A couple of months ago we tried to get two real-life friends play Minecraft together. It took a data engineer, app developer and frontier LLM two evenings to sort out. The amount of settings toggling, account linking, age-gate navigation and “just to make it work” compromises required was extraordinary. By the time you’d got the thing functioning, you’d often loosened more controls than you wanted, or accepted a level of friction that made you wonder why you bothered. The net result? Less real control, not more.

YouTube still offers no simple, reliable way for parents to block individual creators they don’t want their child seeing. It’s all-or-nothing territory or endless whack-a-mole. Gaming platforms, social apps, even “educational” tools — the pattern repeats. The tools that exist are either too blunt or require a part-time systems administrator to manage.

And this is the ecosystem we’ve built while simultaneously pushing children into it.

We sent them online, then made it painful to steer.

Landline phones are at historic lows. The family phone on the wall, with no algorithm and a random assortment of family members to answer, has quietly disappeared. Now the only phone in many homes is a parent’s smartphone. The friction of handing that over (or not) is so high that plenty of children end up with their own device earlier than anyone planned.

At the same time, the low-cost, low-friction things for young children to do in real life have been quietly eroding. Soft play and toddler groups are brilliant until your child turns five or six. Then the cliff edge appears. After-school clubs are expensive or oversubscribed. Supervised outdoor play has shrunk. Community spaces for that in-between age are thin on the ground. So the cheapest, most available, most frictionless option wins: a screen.

We have, in effect, engineered a world in which children are gently (and sometimes not so gently) shunted toward devices, then given tools that make meaningful parental oversight exhausting, and then — when the predictable problems appear — we reach for the bluntest instrument available: a ban.

What we actually need

Bans are easy to announce. Building the alternative is harder.

Whatever happens with any specific proposal (and these things have a habit of shifting), the daily friction remains. GDPR, COPPA, platform design choices, and the sheer cumulative weight of “safety” systems that were never designed with real parents in mind — none of it is going away on its own.

We need real, affordable, accessible places for children and young people to hang out in real life. Not just sports clubs that require two working parents and a car, but drop-in spaces, messy creative hubs, nature programmes, and properly funded youth provision that doesn’t end at age five or cost a fortune.

We need to bring back simple, shared communication. Landlines, or their modern equivalent: devices whose primary job is to let you talk to people you already know, without an infinite feed attached.

And we need parental controls that are actually designed for parents — granular, intuitive, and powerful enough that you don’t have to choose between “let them play with their friend” and “accept whatever the algorithm throws at them next.”

None of this requires a new government department or another layer of age verification. It requires noticing that the friction we’ve normalised is not inevitable. It was designed, or at least allowed to accumulate. It can be designed differently.

The space we’re trying to hold

At Imaginory we’re not pretending the digital world doesn’t exist. We’re trying to make one small corner of it genuinely good: full of wonder, light on surveillance, heavy on language and imagination, shaped by parents who actually know their children. A place where a struggling reader can fall in love with stories on their own terms, with the right support, without the noise.

That work is already harder than it should be because of the friction layered into everything around it.

The government’s announcement last week was framed as putting power back in parents’ hands. That’s a good slogan. The test will be whether the coming years actually reduce the daily friction parents feel when they try to do the job well or whether we simply add more verification, more workarounds, and more exhaustion while telling ourselves the problem is solved.

Children don’t need another blunt instrument. They need places to play, ways to talk to each other that don’t require a smartphone, and digital spaces that are deliberately built to be safe and joyful.

We can build those things. We just have to stop making it so painfully difficult to do so.

If you’re a parent navigating this exact tension, or another builder trying to make something gentler in this landscape, I’d love to hear what friction you’re hitting. The comments are open.

And if you want to see the kind of digital space we’re building, one that puts wonder and language first, with parents in control, you can find Imaginory at imaginory.ink.

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Imaginory Limited — June 2026