Happy Thursday, and to everyone who's just joined, welcome.

The school holidays are arriving for a lot of you, which in my experience is the exact moment every sensible screen rule you set in term time starts to wobble. The "just one more episode" maths gets creative, the bedtimes drift, and the daily limit you held all year suddenly feels like a fight not worth having.

So this week we look at which of those rules are actually worth defending once the routine falls away, and which you can let slide with a clear conscience. The short version: most of them can go. One shouldn't. And which one matters depends on whether you've got a phone child or a gamer.

So, grab your coffee, here’s what’s been happening this week.

— Heidi

When the school routine disappears, most of your screen-time rules can go with it, and that's fine. The daily cap you set for homework nights was built for a schedule that no longer exists. But two things still need your eye over the holidays, and which one matters depends on your child. For the child with a phone, it's what happens overnight. For the one who'd happily game from breakfast to bedtime, it's something else entirely.

Most term-time rules exist to protect something specific: the early alarm, the homework slot, the bus to catch. When those lift, clinging to every limit creates more friction than it's worth. A rigid daily time cap is the clearest thing to relax. With no school stacked around it, the exact number on the timer matters far less than what the time is doing. A long, rainy afternoon inside one good game or film is not the same thing as restless, joyless scrolling, even if the clock reads the same.

For the phone kids: hold the bedroom rule. This is the one that doesn't take a holiday, because it isn't about schedules, it's about sleep. A systematic review pulling together 44 studies and more than 239,000 children found that screens in the bedroom meant shorter, worse sleep. And it isn't just a snapshot: following children over time, a device in the bedroom predicted shorter sleep a year later, and those who left a phone active overnight struggled more to fall and stay asleep. In the holidays this quietly gets worse, with no alarm forcing a stop and the group chat running on.

For the gamers: watch what's getting crowded out, not the clock. Their holiday problem is the all-day pull, and it helps to know that's by design, the match in progress, the daily reward, the friends all online now. Stopping is built to feel like a loss. There's no clean number for "too much," and anyone who gives you one is guessing. The more useful question is what the gaming is displacing. A whole day on the console matters when it has pushed out sleep, daylight, movement and real people. The same hours matter far less on a day that also had a bike ride, a meal together, and a decent night's sleep.

What to set up before the holidays hit:

One thing stays simpler than any of it. The most useful check isn't the screen-time dashboard. It's whether you broadly know what they're watching and playing, and whether they'd tell you if something there bothered them.

Read more: The screen-time rules worth keeping when school stops →

Blocking children from social media does little if the platforms they're blocked from stay unsafe. That's the conclusion of new guidance from the UN's human rights office, published on 29 May 2026, which argues the harms children meet online aren't inevitable, they come from how platforms are designed and run. Rather than leave parents managing the risk app by app, it wants governments to make companies build safety in from the start.

The guidance doesn't say age limits are wrong. It says they aren't enough on their own, can be circumvented with a false birthday, and can push children towards smaller, less moderated apps. Its sharpest point: rules fixated only on who gets access leave the design and the algorithms untouched. The High Commissioner, Volker Türk, said states should require companies to embed safety into platforms by design, instead of shifting the burden onto parents and children. On age checks, his warning was blunt, done badly they can fail at their goal and expose the personal data of children and adults alike. It runs to ten steps in total, and grounds the whole thing in the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the most widely signed human rights treaty in the world.

What this means for you right now: the next time a country, a school, or a platform announces a new "ban" or "age check", there's one question that cuts through the headline: does this change how the app is built, or only who's allowed through the door? If it only changes who gets in, then for any child who gets past the gate it's the same app it was yesterday. And it gives you a reasonable list to expect when a platform claims "new protections": the safer setting on by default, your child's activity not harvested to keep them scrolling, and a way to see and limit what's collected.

Read the full analysis: The UN has set out ten steps for protecting children online →

When motivation is lacking, jumping into heavy routines is the fastest way to burn out. That’s why millions of people are turning to walking as the foundation of their fitness journey.

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Where every country stands on restricting children's social media. The tracker now covers 29 countries and regions, and this week one moved category and one had a major enforcement upgrade.

🇹🇷 Turkey — moved to Powers Granted. Turkey's under-15 ban was published in the Official Gazette on 1 May and enters force around 1 November 2026. It goes further than most: under-15s barred entirely, 15–17s limited to age-restricted versions with parental consent, verification through the state e-Devlet portal, and unusually, identity verification required for all Turkish users, not just children. Opposition and digital-rights groups call it speech control dressed as child protection.

🇲🇾 Malaysia — enforcement began 1 June. The under-16 account ban is now live, with age verification via government ID (MyKad, passport, or MyDigital ID) and AI age-estimation as a fallback. It applies to platforms with 8 million or more Malaysian users, with fines up to RM10 million. Existing users will be verified on a six-month rolling basis. (The widely reported January date was the platform-licensing regime; the account ban itself only began this week.)

🇬🇧 UK — the "Growing Up in the Online World" consultation closed on 26 May. The government has promised a response "in weeks, not months." The duty to impose age or functionality restrictions on under-16s remains in place, with first restrictions expected by end of 2026.

🇦🇺 Australia — the eSafety Commissioner has conceded the ban has been hard to enforce and hasn't yet reduced harm or kept under-16s offline.

🇺🇸 US Federal — the updated COPPA Rule is now in effect. Separate parental consent is now required before companies can use children's data to train AI models.

See where every country stands on the Wired Parents Country Tracker, updated every Thursday. See the tracker →

We've written about the manosphere before — but this one study changes our understanding.

Our guide to the manosphere drew on research where academics set up fake teenage accounts and watched the algorithm serve them this content within half an hour. New research has now done something better: it tracked the real TikTok viewing of 142 young men, the first study in this space to use what boys actually watched rather than simulated accounts. The finding is both reassuring and clarifying. Almost half the videos (44%) touched on masculinity, but only around 6% was genuinely the manosphere — the rest was ordinary gym, sport and dating content. That ordinary material is exactly the point: it's the innocuous layer that makes the harder stuff feel normal when it arrives. It confirms what the guide already said — boys drift in gradually, they don't fall in through one extreme video — and it's why watching alongside your son still beats hunting for one bad video.

Read the guide →

The UK government's response to its online-world consultation is due "in weeks, not months", and could land any time.

A US federal trial representing school districts against the major platforms is expected to begin this month.

Roblox's Kids and Select accounts are rolling out globally through June. If your child is on it, worth checking which account type they've landed in.

Till next Thursday....

— Heidi