North Korea bans mobile phones for children under 14

North Korea’s South Pyongan province issued a sweeping ban on mobile phone possession by children under 14 in June 2026, threatening parents and teachers with party discipline and administrative punishment if violations are discovered.

A source in South Pyongan province told Daily NK that the provincial party committee convened an emergency meeting on the morning of June 19 to relay a directive imposing a total ban on mobile phone possession by children under the age of 14. Attending the meeting were officials from the provincial public security bureau, the education department of the provincial people’s committee, and leading cadres of the Socialist Patriotic Youth League and the Korean Children’s Union.

The Socialist Patriotic Youth League is a mass youth organization operating under Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK) guidance, while the Korean Children’s Union is its counterpart for younger students, both tasked with ideological education and behavioral oversight of young North Koreans.

The directive contained 11 specific clauses. The first three prohibit children under 14 from possessing mobile phones altogether and instruct Youth League and Children’s Union officials, along with teachers, to confiscate any devices found at school gates or in classrooms and hold them in custody.

Collective punishment for parents and teachers

Clauses four through six require all schools in the province to convene emergency parent meetings within one week of the directive’s issuance. Parents are to be informed of the party’s position and warned that they bear responsibility for preventing their children from accessing outside information through parental mobile phones at home.

Clauses seven through eleven go further, stating that even a single reported violation or suspicious incident during the enforcement process will result in collective punishment extending not only to the child involved but also to the parents and the child’s homeroom teacher. Those implicated are to be subjected to ideological review and held jointly accountable.

The source said the punishments announced go well beyond routine criticism sessions, including potential revocation of WPK membership and administrative penalties, signaling a notably harsher enforcement posture than previous similar campaigns.

The source said the directive was driven by a growing sense of alarm within provincial authorities over what they described as the covert spread of South Korean popular music and videos among teenagers in South Pyongan province, with officials concluding that the ideological identity of young North Koreans is being seriously compromised. The concern over South Korean cultural influence, sometimes referred to in North Korean state discourse as “anti-socialist reactionary culture,” has been a recurring driver of crackdowns on mobile phone use and foreign content in recent years.

The intent, the source explained, is to build a powerful barrier simultaneously across both the home and the school, cutting off access to outside information at both ends for children too young to be subject to the restrictions that already apply to older youth and adults.

The source said that participants in the meeting, as well as Pyongsong city parents and teachers who subsequently learned of the directive’s contents, were gripped by shock and alarm as they scrambled to figure out how to respond to the unprecedented severity of the collective punishment provisions.

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