An Apple ad in Italy showing a toddler using an iPhone has drawn ire from onlookers and even been referred to regulators for review.

As reported by 9to5Mac, Italy’s Autorità garante per l’infanzia e l’adolescenza (AGIA), the country’s authority for children and child safety, is very much aware of the advertisement and has referred the case to additional Italian authorities to see if the advertisement violates any specific laws.

The large billboard shows a young child with an iPhone in their hands with the tagline, “Tutto ok, è iPhone,” which translates to “Everything’s fine, it’s an iPhone.” It’s part of Apple’s expansive “Relax, it’s iPhone” campaign, per 9to5Mac. The campaign typically shows iPhone in adverse conditions or other risky situations, like instances where a smartphone could sustain damage. The idea is to show that iPhone is rugged, safe, and durable.

In this case, one interpretation is that the advertisement was designed to highlight iPhone’s child safety features, suggesting that it’s okay for a very young child to have an iPhone in their hands because iOS includes safeguards to ensure nothing bad happens.


However, not everyone agrees.

As AGIA says, a concerned Milanese resident reached out to it about the advertisement, complaining that Apple’s ad is irresponsible. AGIA shared the complaint in its press release, which has been translated below:

The image in my eyes is disturbing. Because it brings together two worlds that should remain far away: on the one hand, childhood, with its freedom, its innocence, its right to get dirty, bored, invent and know the world; on the other, a tool built to continuously capture attention, create need and make it difficult to break away. Those little hands smeared with food represent an age where everything should still be discovered.

The smartphone, on the other hand, already belongs to the language of adult addiction: notifications, stimuli, quick images, the need to be always connected. The child on the billboard did not choose that object. We adults have put it in their hands and presented it to them as something innocent, desirable and even funny (…) How can we accept an advertisement that associates such a device with such a small child? Why do those who watch over advertising communication not intervene? Why do those who deal with marketing seem not to set an ethical limit, not question the responsibility of the images it spreads?

As for AGIA’s stance on the matter, the authority’s Marina Terragni agrees that there are serious concerns about smartphone use among children and adolescents, particularly very young children.

“Observations with which one can fully agree,” Terragni says of the complaint.

Terragni continues:

While the global debate regarding the minimum age for digital access has been ongoing for some time, this advertisement appears to move in the exact opposite direction, normalizing a scenario we unfortunately witness with alarming frequency: children — even very young ones– left to ‘electronic babysitting,’ a practice that can spark an addiction with serious consequences for their psychological and cognitive development. It is primarily families who are less informed and less culturally equipped who hand over devices to children — or rather, hand the children over to the devices — from the earliest stages of childhood. An advertisement of this kind normalizes and validates such behaviors, risking the undoing of efforts made by policymakers and grassroots family groups (such as ‘Patti Digitali’) by moving in a diametrically opposed direction.


The global debate on children’s access to smartphones and particularly social media networks has ramped up in recent years. While in the United States, such regulations are left to individual states and relatively few have taken any meaningful action, elsewhere in the world the wheels are in motion.

France very recently proposed legislation to ban social media for children under 15 years old, a first in the European Union. The United Kingdom recently put forward similar legislation for anyone under 16. Australia was the first country to institute a similar ban in 2024, although it hasn’t exactly proven effective or easy to enforce.

Per 9to5Mac, Apple has not commented on the advertisement in question.