Amine Benyamina
Government & Regulators · Enfants et écrans commission
Co-chaired the French commission that recommended no smartphone before age 13 — one of Europe's most detailed screen-policy reports.
Amine Benyamina co-chaired the commission convened under President Macron to study children and screens, alongside Servane Mouton. Their report, "Enfants et écrans," was published in April 2024 and ran to 29 recommendations, including a call for no smartphone before age 13. It stands among the most detailed government-commissioned reviews of childhood screen use produced anywhere, and it fed directly into the broader European policy conversation this library tracks under the government lane. Benyamina's role as co-chair puts the commission's findings, and the political weight behind them, on the record alongside the individual researchers and clinicians cited throughout this library.
Suicide and self-harm are complex and never caused by one factor alone. Problematic screen use, cyberbullying, harmful content, and online exploitation may increase risk or intensify existing distress. If someone is in immediate danger or emotional crisis in the United States, call or text 988.
WORKS IN THE LIBRARY (9)
VIDEOS
L'œil de Philippe Caverivière face à Amine Benyamina et Servane Mouton
RTL's daily satirical morning chronicle, 'L'œil de Philippe Caverivière,' devoted its segment the same morning the 'Enfants et écrans' report was delivered to the President to a comedic riff on its findings, built around co-chairs Amine Benyamina and Servane Mouton appearing as guests on the station's morning show. The bit, publicly titled around a joke that screens will leave teenagers 'fat and blind,' used exaggeration for comic effect rather than presenting new evidence; it does not add independent claims beyond the commission's own report. TechKids Foundation includes it here as a documented example of how the co-chairs' work reached a mass French radio audience on the day of publication, not as a source of new statistics or clinical findings — no claim in this entry should be read as an independent finding beyond what the commission's own report already states.
Podcast — Enfants et écrans : à la recherche du temps perdu, avec le Pr Amine Benyamina
In this podcast episode hosted by Addict'AIDE, the addiction-support organization Amine Benyamina presides over, he revisits his commission's 'Enfants et écrans' report and situates screen engagement within his broader addiction-medicine framework. He describes how features like infinite scroll, notifications, and social feeds are engineered to hold attention and argues that, clinically, what people become attached to is the content and stimulation a screen delivers, not the device itself — drawing a parallel to how his patients relate to substances. The episode frames this as his own clinical and policy perspective rather than a formal diagnostic category, since screen-use disorder is not yet officially recognized alongside substance-use disorders. TechKids Foundation cites this podcast as an example of Benyamina explaining his commission's findings to a specialist addiction-treatment audience, framed throughout as his professional interpretation.
Une heure avec la neurologue Servane Mouton
In this hour-long interview program produced by Fréquence Protestante and hosted by Frédérick Casadesus, neurologist Servane Mouton discusses her book 'Écrans, un désastre sanitaire' and the wider public debate it sparked. She describes widespread screen dependency across French society, not only among children, and criticizes what she characterizes as the National Education system's promotion of largely unmoderated classroom screen use, again noting an exception for students with disabilities. The program frames her message as a deliberately 'constructive and positive' warning rather than blanket condemnation of digital tools. TechKids Foundation includes this interview as an example of Mouton explaining her book's argument to a general public-affairs audience, presented throughout as her own stated position and professional judgment rather than as an independent TechKids finding.
Exposition aux écrans et santé des enfants, avec Amine Benyamina
In this interview for the parent-focused environmental-health site 'Santé des enfants et environnement,' Amine Benyamina lays out the age-graded screen-exposure thresholds from his co-chaired government commission for a general-audience readership: no screens recommended before age 3, only occasional, adult-supervised, educationally curated use between 3 and 6, and a shift toward moderate, controlled exposure from 6 onward, alongside no phone before 11 and no social media before 15. He argues that digital content creators use highly effective attention-capture techniques, particularly through video games and algorithmic feeds, and that parental-control tools function more as marketing and liability cover for platforms than as genuinely effective protection. TechKids Foundation cites this interview as Benyamina's own plain-language explanation of the commission's age-threshold recommendations to families, not as new clinical evidence.
Le Grand Face-à-face — Écrans, un désastre sanitaire, avec Servane Mouton
France Inter's weekend debate program 'Le Grand Face-à-face,' hosted by Thomas Snégaroff, devoted its February 15, 2025 broadcast to Servane Mouton's newly published book 'Écrans, un désastre sanitaire,' with journalists Natacha Polony and Gilles Finchelstein joining as sparring interlocutors. The format is a live, unscripted debate rather than a scripted interview, pressing Mouton on the scope of her claims about screen omnipresence and inviting pushback from the other panelists. TechKids Foundation cites this broadcast as a documented instance of Mouton defending and refining her book's argument under public, adversarial questioning on a major national radio network, presented here as her stated position within a debate format, not as an independent TechKids finding.
STUDIES
Enfants et écrans : à la recherche du temps perdu
In January 2024, France's President asked a ten-member expert commission to spend three months studying children's exposure to screens; psychiatrist-addictologist Amine Benyamina and neurologist Servane Mouton co-chaired it. After interviewing roughly 150 young people and more than 100 professionals, the commission delivered a 130-page report in April 2024 with 29 directive recommendations. It describes French households owning about 10 screens on average and links heavy, unaccompanied screen exposure to poorer sleep, reduced physical activity, and myopia, and — framed as a risk factor among vulnerable teens, not a single cause — to associations with anxiety, depression, and suicide-risk indicators. It proposes no smartphone before 11, no connected phone before 13, and no social media before 15 except on 'ethically' designed platforms, plus new obligations on platforms, schools, and parents. TechKids treats the report as association-level evidence, consistent with the commission's own caution against single-cause claims.
Rapport n° 822 (2024-2025) sur la protection des mineurs en ligne
The French Senate's European Affairs Committee lists Servane Mouton, in her capacity as co-chair of the 'Enfants et écrans' expert commission, among the specialists it formally heard while drafting this report on a European resolution to strengthen online child-safety rules under the EU's Digital Services Act. The report leans heavily on the Mouton–Benyamina commission's April 2024 findings throughout — citing its statistics on household screen exposure, sleep and vision effects, and social-media-linked mental-health risk factors among vulnerable teens — to support calling for platform-run age verification, a European 'digital majority' age, and firmer enforcement against TikTok, Meta, and pornography sites. TechKids Foundation cites this Senate report both as documented parliamentary testimony involving Mouton and as an independent government body's substantive reliance on the pair's commission report, framed here strictly as association-level risk factors, not proof that any platform single-handedly causes any listed harm.