The department of basic education is developing national guidelines on screen time for children aged 2 to 6, basic education minister Siviwe Gwarube told parliament on Tuesday, marking South Africa’s first targeted intervention on children’s digital exposure, but one that is narrow in scope.
“We will develop national screen-time guidelines for children between ages 2 and 6 to help protect the development of language, attention, memory and social skills,” the minister said.
She added: “We are also reviewing the 2004 white paper on e-education and developing practical national guidance on the use of AI in our classrooms. Our approach is clear: the machine may assist but the teacher must decide, the learner must think and the system must protect.”
The minister said the department has drawn on a growing body of international research showing prolonged, non-educational screen exposure in early childhood is linked to delays in language, cognition and fine motor control, as well as poorer sleep and reduced play and reading.
The intervention is welcome on its own terms, but it is not the policy an active international debate would lead one to expect.
Gwarube has addressed the cognitive and developmental risks of screen exposure to young children but not the much louder global question of social media access by older children. She has also not proposed restricting smartphone use in classrooms. The guidelines, when published, will be advisory rather than enforceable, and will target only the early childhood development band.
Older children
That leaves South Africa some distance behind jurisdictions that have moved to legislate on access to social media by older children. Australia last December became the first country to ban children under 16 from major platforms, including TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook and Snapchat. The onus is placed on the platforms, which face fines if they fail to take reasonable steps to keep minors off their services.
The Australian law has triggered a wave of similar action. Malaysia has said it will introduce its own under-16 ban, while the European parliament passed a non-binding resolution calling for a harmonised social media age limit of 16 across the bloc, with a digital age limit of 13 for video-sharing services and so-called AI companions.
Read: Australia has banned kids from social media. Should South Africa follow suit?
South Africa has nothing comparable in the pipeline. The Cybercrimes Act and the Protection of Personal Information Act address online safety in narrow respects, but not children specifically. Communications minister Solly Malatsi last year published a draft of the Audio and Audio Visual Services and Online Content Safety Bill – the third draft since 2020 – which is yet to be passed into law.
Read: South Africa urged to do more to protect kids online
The country’s wider policy response to online harms has been reactive, fragmented and stuck in outdated frameworks – the Film and Publications Board still leans on classification models designed in the age of DVDs, even as millions of South African children use TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube daily, often with no supervision and no technical safety barriers in place. – © 2026 NewsCentral Media