One morning in a classroom in Tebing Tinggi, Indonesia, the informatics teacher Mia Yolanda Siregar asked her seventh-graders a simple question: “Who among you does not have a laptop or computer at home?” The room fell silent. A few students exchanged glances. Then, slowly, a hand went up. It belonged to a quiet boy she calls Ramah, whose family’s economic constraints meant he had almost never touched a computer. Using a mouse or typing on a keyboard was still foreign to him, and among peers already navigating the digital world, he often felt left behind and unsure of himself.

That small gesture, witnessed in a state junior high school on the island of Sumatra, captures a tension now running through societies thousands of miles apart. In Colombia, a recent national mental health survey has documented what psychologists and educators increasingly recognise: two entire generations, millennials and Gen Z, are showing higher rates of anxiety, low attention and poor frustration tolerance. The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, whose bestseller The Anxious Generation has fuelled the debate, places much of the blame on the toxic mix of smartphones and social media. Australia has already banned social media for under-16s, and France’s prohibition takes effect this September, a move President Macron has presented as a necessary step toward regulating tech companies.

Yet the push for outright bans is meeting scepticism. A survey by the Molly Rose Foundation found that 61 per cent of Australian 12- to 15-year-olds still access social media, and teenagers describe the prohibition as a joke easily circumvented. In Italy, the advocacy group Meritocrazia Italia has argued that the state’s first instinct should not be punishment but education. “We put a smartphone in the hands of five- and six-year-olds and leave them alone in front of a jungle,” the group said in a statement, criticising the absence of digital civic education in schools and any real support for families. It has long proposed a unified law on social media access, with clear age rules, platform obligations and mandatory digital literacy, a vision it says is now being taken up by other European countries.

In Sweden, a school counsellor named Nilofar Sherinbek wrote ahead of the new school year that children need adults who are curious about their digital lives and willing to set limits. “It is not loveless to say no, limit screen time or want to know what your child is playing and watching,” she wrote. “It is care.” Her plea was for home and school to convey the same message about respect, language, responsibility and empathy, so that children feel safer and understand what is expected of them. In Latin America, the aftershocks of the pandemic have deepened the uncertainty. A study by the Observatory of Social Debt at Argentina’s Universidad Católica Argentina found that young people, especially from vulnerable households, want to work but find it nearly impossible, and the consumption of psychotropic drugs has risen as families and health systems reach for pharmaceutical answers to symptoms of anxiety and depression.

Back in that Indonesian classroom, the arrival of an Interactive Flat Panel, a device donated by the president as part of a government push for technology-based learning, changed the dynamic. The quiet boy, Ramah, and his classmates took turns touching the screen, learning to recognise computer functions, arranging simple algorithms and solving computational thinking challenges in groups. No one was left as a spectator. For a moment, the screen that had marked a divide became a surface where every child could leave a fingerprint.