Summary
Europe has been at the forefront of the movement to embed children’s rights at the core of digital solutions such as the UK’s Age-Appropriate Design Code, the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) and Greece’s contributions highlighted during the Lyceum Project. In this blog post, Konstantinos Karachalios from IEEE and Denia Psarrou from IEEE SA explore how global and European age-appropriate design frameworks can enable children safe and empowering access to digital technologies and how IEEE SA contributes to age-appropriate governance through standardized approaches.
Children today grow up in an environment shaped by digital systems that were never designed with their best interests in mind. Long before they can understand consent, privacy, or persuasion, minors leave behind millions of digital traces—data points collected, inferred, and monetized through business models built around attention extraction.
Over the past decade, growing evidence has linked these design practices—such as infinite scroll, autoplay, and behavioral nudging—to addictive patterns of use, with serious consequences for children’s well-being, development, and mental health. What was once treated as a parental or educational challenge has increasingly been recognized as a structural design problem, requiring coordinated legal and technological responses.
From Awareness to Action: Age-Appropriate Design Takes Hold
A pivotal response emerged through the concept of age-appropriate system design—a framework that shifts responsibility upstream, toward the design choices of digital platforms themselves.
The first comprehensive implementation came in the United Kingdom, with the Age-Appropriate Design Code entering into force in 2021. Despite strong resistance from parts of the technology sector, the Code established a clear principle: children’s rights and developmental needs must shape how digital services are designed and operated.
This approach quickly gained international traction. California adopted a closely aligned framework in 2022, followed by additional U.S. states. At the multilateral level, the United Nations amended its interpretation of children’s digital rights in 2023, explicitly identifying manipulative and addictive design practices as a global concern.
Throughout this period, the IEEE Standards Association (IEEE SA) has played an enabling role, contributing technical expertise, convening stakeholders, and helping translate high-level rights principles into implementable, engineering-ready approaches. IEEE SA has worked alongside legislators, regulators, civil society, and researchers to help inform policy ambitions with realistic system design considerations—without diluting their protective intent.
2025: A Global Turning Point
Momentum accelerated markedly in 2025.
- Indonesia, home to one of the world’s largest child populations, enacted a national framework aligned with age-appropriate design principles after an extended legislative process.
- In Brazil, the Digital Statute of the Child and Adolescent (ECA Digital, 2025) enshrined age-appropriate design standards into law, including prohibitions of manipulative design and other commercially exploitative practices, such as behavioural profiling and emotional analysis, as well as expert supervision over AI tools and recommender systems to ensure their safety.
- In the European Union, the European Commission issued detailed Guidelines for the implementation of Article 28 of the Digital Services Act, consolidating best practices from earlier national codes and providing concrete expectations for platform design and risk mitigation.
- Greece emerged as a key contributor during this phase, with national institutions actively supporting and shaping the EU approach. These efforts were publicly highlighted in June 2025 during The Lyceum Project, a collaboration with Greece’s National Centre for Scientific Research “Demokritos,” featuring dialogue between Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and Baroness Beeban Kidron, who initiated the UK’s original code.
IEEE SA supported these developments by continuing to provide neutral technical guidance, international coordination, and standards-based perspectives that help policymakers and industry align around shared definitions, safeguards, and design expectations.
A New Signal from China (2026)
In January 2026, another significant signal emerged. The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) announced the adoption of Classification Measures for Online Information That May Affect the Physical and Mental Health of Minors, which will enter into force on March 1, 2026.
The Measures establish classifications, judgment standards, and notification requirements for online information that may adversely affect minors. They require content producers and online service providers to take preventive measures, provide prominent notices, and manage risks associated with harmful or inappropriate content. Violations will be addressed under existing cybersecurity and minors-protection laws.
While rooted in China’s domestic legal framework, the Measures reflect a converging global recognition: children require differentiated protections online, and digital systems must be designed with their developmental vulnerabilities in mind.
Looking Ahead
As these frameworks move from legislation to enforcement, the focus increasingly shifts to implementation—how platforms redesign systems so that children can benefit from digital services without being trapped by manipulative architectures.
IEEE Standards Association plays a critical enabling role in this global transition—bringing together policymakers, technologists, industry, and civil society to build shared understanding and practical pathways for change. Through consensus-based standards, technical guidance, and international collaboration, IEEE SA helps translate children’s rights and policy objectives into design approaches that are feasible, interoperable, and scalable across borders. In fact, IEEE SA has started a new Technology Policy Collaborative Program to enable policy makers to share experiences and challenges, and learn from each other and IEEE SA’s existing body of work.
The global direction is now clear. Across jurisdictions with very different legal traditions and political systems, lawmakers are converging on a shared conclusion: the design of digital technology matters, and protecting childhood in the digital age is both a societal responsibility and a technical challenge that can be achieved.
The work is far from complete—but the foundation has been laid. And for the first time in the online context, children’s rights are being taken seriously not only in words, but in code, standards, and system design.
About the authors
Konstantinos Karachalios, Advisor to the IEEE Executive Director, IEEE
Denia Psarrou, Program Director, IEEE SA