There's a collective action problem here, though. Some parents are willing to do the hard thing and tell their kid no over and over and over. Most aren't. The result is that kids don't hang out in person any more and so the only social outlet left is digital, which makes the decision to ban it at the family level even harder because you may actually do more harm than good by forcing your child to not participate with his friends.

If there's widespread agreement that social media is dangerous and yet widespread difficulty coordinating a response among parents, isn't that exactly what the government is for?

We can apply this to everything. No one is trying to raise the age of candy and soda purchase to 16. Although we know that having access to these things drastically impacts children's health. Fast food too.

Like it's the literal job of a parent to tell their kids no. Over and over and over again. So instead of parents teaching healthy habits easy with something a child will not be a le to avoid as an adult, we'll just unleash them on them right when failure is high impact because some parents are lazy and we're not willing to have public service campaigns anymore.

Or really want this is is one more step to a de-anon'd internet, where everyone's speech can be controlled.

Kids will quickly learn that if their parents say "yes", they can get on social media, and so parents will still have to say "no" over and over again. The only difference is now we need to make sure our government papers are in order before we participate in the most important communication forum of our time.

Every parenting problem has the same collective action problem. It's called peer pressure.

The only effective response I'm aware of is a collective one. This is not that. This is fascism.

> This is not that. This is fascism.

fascism is when no kids on the internet

You don't have to do something all the way, for it to be that thing. A hop still qualifies as a jump. Demanding adults ID-verify their age is still fascism.

Restricting access to devices is the easy part (although keeping ahead of kids breaking in is not). Exposing your kids to enormous peer pressure and social isolation is the hard part.

> put parental controls on your kids devices

We did that. My kids (twins) pooled their allowance money for a few months and had a friend at school buy them an old iPhone that they shared in a locker at school. They went wild on social media once they were set loose, to the detriment of everyone involved.

There was a government report in the last couple years that concluded (paraphrasing) “the ideal amount of social media for teens is greater than zero and less than ‘all day’—but it’s not clear where it becomes harmful.”

TL;DR-nature, uh, finds a way…

> They went wild on social media once they were set loose

Do you think keeping them away from it initially drove them to this faster?

I have wondered about that, but we didn’t keep them strictly from it. They had Instagram and a couple other things—with screen time limits and we knew their account handles. That was apparently enough friction for them to find a workaround. “Went wild” in this context means they signed up for dozens of accounts on dozens of different services—SnapChat, Discord, Instagram, and others I’d never heard of at all.

> we knew their account handles

I would've taken offence to this bit too, FWIW. Privacy is important.

> Privacy is important.

I strongly agree, but it needs to be balanced against being 14 on the open internet.

And you can't have it both ways here–it can't be "be a parent: control and limit your kids' on the internet" and "you have to give your kids complete privacy on the internet". My goal has always been to support their growth and development by giving them progressively more responsibility and autonomy as they grow up.

> And you can't have it both ways here–it can't be "be a parent: control and limit your kids' on the internet" and "you have to give your kids complete privacy on the internet".

Well I don't think I said otherwise, but not only is this rather absolute, it's not true. I don't see how limiting screen time, for example, precludes respecting their privacy.

May I ask: Why is it important to know their account handles?

Might as well put porn on TV and billboards and tell parents to cover their kids eyes and change the channel. It's about time government did something useful for once.

My daughter broke or worked around three different parental control systems, including Google's own Family Link. There is always some webview in some settings page that will not be regulated and can be used to browse the Internet or some crap like this. These systems are either all poor or this game of whack a mole is unwinnable in principle.