Reducing exposure to illegal or extreme and graphic content is essential. But children’s well-being requires more than the absence of harm. It depends on stable relationships, appropriate boundaries, physical activity, and opportunities for real-world social connection. Risks multiply when digital environments disrupt rather than support healthy development.
Generative AI is a major force multiplier in terms of both risks and opportunities for child well-being. Used responsibly, purpose-built AI tools may support education, accessibility, and health. But their long-term impact on children’s expectations of relationships, empathy, or self-regulation is unclear. As long as that remains true, a precautionary approach is not anti-innovation. It is pro-child.
Digital balance is part of the solution. While digital environments require regulation, transparency, age-appropriate design, stronger safety and trust features, and accountability, evidence must keep pace with technology, requiring independent, longitudinal research across income settings and regions.
Above all, we must listen to today’s youth. As active users of technology, they can help digital environments evolve responsibly. The online and offline worlds now form a single space where digital tools can support healthy development or crowd it out. Young people should bring their own lived experiences to bear in order to help shape appropriate guardrails. Parents, caregivers, schools, and communities must also be part of this conversation.
This process demands sustained collaboration across governments, industry, civil society, and public-health institutions, built on a shared commitment to maximising benefits and minimising harms. More transparency, data sharing, health-promoting design choices, and corporate support for effective safety standards, especially for minors, are essential. The WHO can play its convening role and influence in setting norms and standards.
Our children and young people are not experimental subjects, a captive market, or a commodity. Together, we can and must shape digital environments that protect and support their healthy development. The choices we make now will echo for generations.
Macron is President of France; Ghebreyesus is Director-General of the World Health Organisation
Project Syndicate
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