Life after likes: How UAE parents can help children navigate the offline transition

Dubai: A year from now, daily life will look a little different for the UAE's youngest residents. Under a new Cabinet resolution, children under 15 will no longer be able to hold social media accounts, and 15 and 16-year-olds will use platforms with extra safeguards in place. The companies behind the apps have up to 12 months to make it happen.

For plenty of parents, the news landed as relief. But a ban on its own does not raise a happier, calmer child. What fills the space left behind matters far more than what is taken away, and according to Dr Alexandre Machado, the year ahead is a rare opening.

Dr Machado, Senior Clinical Neuropsychologist and advanced neuromodulation (Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation) specialist at Medcare Royal Speciality, sees the measure as, in effect, a large-scale experiment in how a generation grows up in the digital age. Its success will be judged not by the screen hours saved but by the quality of the inner life that grows in their place.

The headline version is simple. Cabinet Resolution No. 106 of 2026, issued in June, sets the minimum age for social media at 15. Children below that cannot create, use or operate a personal account. Teenagers who are 15 or 16 can stay on, but with age-appropriate content settings, limits on contact with strangers, screen-time tools and parental controls built in.

Parental consent does not get around the rule, and platforms must verify ages properly rather than letting users simply type in a birthday. The UAE is the first Arab country to go this far, following Australia and a string of European nations. Crucially, there is a transition period of up to a year before it all takes effect.

When the scrolling stops, expect some restlessness. Irritability, boredom and a flat "there's nothing to do" mood are normal. Screens deliver fast, repeated hits of dopamine, the brain's reward chemical, and Dr Machado says it takes a little while for a child to recalibrate without them. For most, that settles within two to three weeks.

He is keen to stress that this early frustration is not simply bad behaviour. "Frustration can be a sign of healthy resistance to the loss of an attachment object," he says, and learning to sit with it is itself good for a child's mental health.

What is worth watching for is when it does not pass. If low mood, a loss of pleasure in things the child used to enjoy, withdrawal from friends or big changes in sleep stretch beyond a month, Dr Machado advises treating that as a cue to look more closely, and to seek support from a GP or counsellor. Sometimes, he notes, heavy use of the networks was quietly managing an anxiety or low mood that was already there.

The common mistake, in Dr Machado's view, is to remove without replacing. "Prohibiting without replacing creates a symbolic void," he says, one that tends to breed resentment and a bit of sneaking around.

The better approach is to offer real offline belonging. He points to team sport, theatre, debate or book clubs, and volunteering with a clear purpose. Activities with a touch of mystery and challenge land especially well at this age, he adds, things like escape rooms, citizen science projects or street-art workshops. They tap into the same hunger for novelty and reward, just earned more slowly and felt more deeply.

Here is a reframe worth holding onto. Boredom, Dr Machado says, is not the enemy but "the cradle of creativity." Those blank, restless afternoons that screens used to mop up are exactly where imagination and self-directed play tend to come from, and learning to tolerate them is a genuine life skill. Resisting the urge to rescue your child from every dull moment is one of the more useful things a parent can do.

For teenagers in particular, Dr Machado describes social media as a "digital mirror", a space where a sense of self is built through the reactions of others: the likes, the comments, the follower count. Take that away and some genuinely ask, "Who am I without my likes?"

That is not a crisis to fear, he says, but a conversation to have. Identity "is not given, but constructed through authentic choices", and the job of parents is to help a child recognise themselves as more than digital feedback. Help them notice the friend who turns up when it matters, the one who can cook or fix a bike, the one who makes the whole table laugh.

None of this works if the adults are glued to their own phones. Children copy what they see far more than what they are told, so Dr Machado puts the most important preparation at home, in what he calls co-regulation.

He suggests a no-judgement family digital audit, done together, asking honestly what each app gives the household and what it takes. Bring back screen-free meals and phone-free "analogue Saturdays".

Go for walks with the devices left behind. And talk openly about your own tug-of-war with distraction and comparison, which models that this is hard for everyone, not a personal failing.

Families are not doing this alone. Schools, Dr Machado argues, can make the offline day genuinely compelling rather than bolting on the odd club, through project work that needs real teamwork, honest lessons on how notifications and algorithms are designed to hook attention, and space to chew over the bigger questions of what real friendship is and what boredom is for. The aim, as he puts it, is to transform external control into internal awareness.

Hands-on workshops like carpentry, ceramics or gardening give children the satisfaction of making something solid.

The next six to 12 months are the real window. The teenage brain is unusually good at forming new habits, Dr Machado says, so routines built now tend to stick. Fill the time with things genuinely worth doing and the restriction "will be felt as a liberation toward richer experiences". Leave a void, and "it will be lived as deprivation".

The ban, in the end, is the easy part. The real work, and the real opportunity, is turning that first wave of frustration into what Dr Machado calls creative frustration, and helping a generation become "authors of their own biographical narratives", treating digital life as a tool rather than the main stage of existence.