This week, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced that Britain will ban children under 16 from using social media apps including TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and X. The ban is expected to take effect early next year. Platforms that don’t comply face multimillion-dollar fines.

Starmer’s reasoning was blunt: “Every parent can see it with their own eyes. Social media is making children unhappy.” He’s not wrong, and he’s not alone. Australia already passed a similar law last year. Canada, Brazil, Indonesia, France, Spain, Denmark, Thailand, and South Korea are all studying or developing their own versions.

For years, parents who limited their kids’ social media access got the side-eye. Too strict. Overprotective. Now governments are catching up to what a lot of families already knew: handing a kid an algorithm-driven feed before they’re old enough to drive is not “keeping up with the times.” It’s an experiment, and the results aren’t great.

So what do you do instead?

Here’s the part nobody talks about. If you take social media away from kids (or never give it to them in the first place), you still have to give them something. Kids want to be seen. They want to share what they made, what they did, what they’re proud of. That instinct doesn’t go away just because the apps do.

The question isn’t “social media or nothing.” It’s “where does that energy go instead?”

This is where most families get stuck. The options are either total absence (no record, no outlet) or a quiet handoff to platforms built for strangers, algorithms, and likes. Neither one is actually built for a family.

A place to put it that isn’t a feed

This is exactly why we built My Peeps the way we did.

My Peeps gives kids a place to share their lives, their art, their milestones, their stories, without an audience, without a follower count, without an algorithm deciding who sees it or when. No likes. No public profiles. No comments from strangers. Just family.

A kid can post the science fair project, the goal they scored, the song they wrote, the dumb joke they thought was hilarious, and it goes to the people who actually love them. Grandma sees it. Dad sees it. Future-them sees it in ten years. That’s it. That’s the whole audience, and that’s the point.

We’ve said it before: My Peeps is For Family, Not Fans. While the rest of the internet is being forced to reckon with what it’s done to kids, we built something that was never trying to be that internet in the first place.

The bigger opportunity here

If you’re a parent who’s relieved about the UK ban, or wishing your country would follow, here’s the thing: don’t just wait for the law to catch up. Start now.

Start the family habit of capturing and sharing privately, before the ban forces the conversation. Give your kids a place to be proud of something today, not just a place where something was taken away. The families who come out ahead of this shift won’t be the ones who simply removed an app. They’ll be the ones who replaced it with something better, on purpose, years before the headlines made it mandatory.

The world is catching up to what families building their lives in My Peeps have known for a while: kids don’t need an audience. They need people who’ll remember.

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My Peeps is a private family memory and legacy platform. Learn more at themypeepsapp.com.

Ready to start? [Explore the Life Story Journal] and start capturing the stories that matter most.

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