A household in Mysore with no television set has become an unlikely window into a wider anxiety sweeping Indian families. Digangana Mukherjee, mother to a six-year-old girl and a ten-year-old boy, has kept screens out of her home not as a passing experiment but as a considered response to what she sees as an unmanageable flow of content reaching children. Her decision arrives just as India's government is reportedly preparing legislation that would bar anyone under 18 from opening a social media account, a move that follows a Supreme Court observation that accounts created by minors should be treated as legally void.
A Family's Quiet Experiment
Mukherjee's approach did not begin with social media at all. A year ago, her son's school introduced a smart classroom board that streamed lessons online, prompting the family to move him to a school that still relies on chalk and slate boards, where lessons unfold at a slower pace. The choice reflects a broader unease among parents who feel that digital tools, even when framed as educational aids, quietly normalise screen dependency from an early age. For Mukherjee, banning television was a natural extension of that same instinct: if a classroom board could introduce uncontrolled content, an unsupervised television or smartphone could do so far more easily.
Her concern sharpened once she realised her ten-year-old had already learned to browse video platforms on his own. "I don't know what content is visible to him," she said, describing the discomfort many parents feel when a child's digital fluency outpaces their own ability to supervise it.
The Legal Shift Behind the Headlines
The proposed restriction on minors opening social media accounts would mark a significant departure from current practice in India, where enforcement of existing age minimums set by platforms themselves has long been inconsistent. Most major platforms already require users to be at least 13, but verification typically relies on self-declared birthdates, a system easily circumvented by a child or, in many cases, a parent. A law grounded in a Supreme Court position that underage accounts are void would shift responsibility more squarely onto platforms, which would need stronger age-verification mechanisms rather than passive age gates.
Such a shift raises familiar questions about implementation. Verifying age online without collecting intrusive personal data, such as government identification, is a persistent technical and privacy challenge worldwide. Countries including Australia and France have moved in similar directions, experimenting with age-assurance technology, parental consent frameworks, and outright restrictions, with mixed results. India's version of this debate will likely hinge on how strictly it is enforced and whether platforms face real penalties for non-compliance.
Screens, Childhood, and the Limits of Policy
Mukherjee's experience illustrates a tension that no single law can fully resolve. Policy can restrict account creation, but it cannot easily govern what a child sees through a shared family device, a sibling's login, or a classroom board streaming video content with a teacher's best intentions. Her family's response was behavioural rather than regulatory: removing the television, choosing a slower-paced school, and limiting exposure at the source rather than waiting for institutional safeguards to catch up.
That instinct echoes a pattern seen globally, where parents increasingly treat screen exposure as a household risk to be managed directly, alongside, rather than instead of, whatever rules governments eventually pass. If India's proposed age restriction becomes law, it will likely be one piece of a larger, slower cultural adjustment, one in which families like Mukherjee's are already improvising their own answers.
