An open letter from MadFun: Yes, restrict social media for under-16s. We said it.

To every parent who has ever stood at the bottom of the garden watching a child fly off a trampoline mid-laugh, this one's for you.

For over twenty years, MadFun has sold trampolines, pools, and the kind of outdoor kit families used to take for granted: things that get children outside, muddy, laughing, falling over, and getting back up again. For most of that time, we've felt like we were swimming against the tide. Outdoor play became the “nice to have”, squeezed into half-term holidays and the occasional dry Sunday afternoon, while screens quietly took everything else.

So when the government announced plans to restrict social media access for under 16s, you might expect a trampoline company to cheer from the rooftops. We do, loudly. But not for the reason you might think.

We are not anti-screen, and we are not anti-social media. We're not interested in pretending every app is poison and every garden is paradise, because that's lazy, and frankly it's not true. Social media, used well and used at the right age, can open a child's eyes to the world: to causes worth caring about, to communities they'd never find on their street, to ideas their school timetable has no room for. We've watched our own customers, parents running businesses from their kitchen tables, build entire livelihoods on the same platforms an 11 year old uses to watch strangers fall over. None of that is the enemy.

The enemy is the algorithm built to keep an 11 year old scrolling at 11pm. The enemy is a feed engineered by adults, for profit, that has no interest in whether the child on the other end has been outside today, slept properly, or spoken to another human being face to face since breakfast. That's not “social” media. That's a business model wearing a friendly app icon, and children are the product, not the customer.

We're not naive about the objections either. Plenty of parents will rightly ask why the state should override what they decide is best for their own household, and they're entitled to that view. Enforcement won't be perfect: a determined 14 year old will find a way onto a private group, an alternative platform, or a friend's older sibling's account, and no piece of legislation changes that overnight. We're not pretending this fixes everything in one go.

But “it won't be perfect” has never been a good reason to do nothing. So if this restriction makes us unpopular with platforms whose entire engagement strategy depends on children's eyeballs, good. We were never getting a slice of their advertising budget anyway. We'd rather be the company that gets your kids back into the garden than the one quietly cheering on a feed that keeps them indoors and wired until midnight.

Here's where we'll probably upset a few people, and we're fine with that. We don't think this is really about “protecting children from harm” in some abstract sense. We think it's about protecting their childhood, full stop. The right to be bored on a Tuesday afternoon. The right to skin a knee learning a backflip nobody filmed. The right to have a real, unremarkable, unposted Saturday. Somewhere along the way, defending that became controversial. We're not sure when “let kids be kids” turned into a hot take, but here we are, and we're not backing down from it.

We know not every family will agree with us, and that's fine too. Parenting in 2026 is hard enough without a trampoline company telling you how to do it. But we'll keep doing what we've always done: making it as easy as possible for screen time to be replaced by garden time, however that looks for your family, whenever you're ready for it.

Let them play. The rest can wait until they're older.

Suraj Sodha
Managing Director, MadFun Ltd