You can say it should be on the parents here and reason why, but for a lot of things it is not just on the parents (children are not allowed to vote, drive a car, buy guns, go to bar and drink alcohol, gamble, ... - it is a long list).

Such bans are not clear and are contentious, and often leave room for parental discretion.

In most countries whether children drink alcohol at home is up to their parents. In some countries an adult can buy teenagers a drink (in the UK they increased the required age from 14 to 16 - and I think its a bad thing).

There are people who think 16 year olds should be allowed to vote.

Kids cannot buy guns, but can use them. I did a bit of rife shooting at school.

Is it really contentious if 10 year old children cannot on their own buy liquor or guns, for example? I would not have put that high on the list of contentious issues.

There is a difference in being granted unsupervised abilities vs supervised ones.

I was one of the last people in my class to get a phone, which taught me that not having the cool new thing was not nearly as bad as I had thought.

As is pointed out in the article, a huge factor is the collective action trap. An individual set of parents can do very little to deal with mental health if they are the only ones.

I totally doubt this is true. Its a nice excuse though.

Tell us you don't have kids without telling us you don't have kids. Short of totally unplugging your children from broader society via homeschooling, joining a commune, or similar extremes, children are exposed to whatever other children's parents permit through nothing more complicated than their interactions with other kids. An example from pre-digital times would be that one kid who's dad kept a stash of nudie mags unsecured which invariably lead to hushed giggling in the back of the bus.

I was that kid (I mean one with boundaries set, with parents that acted against all of this, just to be clear) and now a father, with my second kid on her way. Still very young, so I can't claim to have much experience. But I am getting ready to stand against all of this, and I do intend to delay their exposure to social networks, mass information, etc. as much as possible.

At least until their character is formed and they have developed essential human traits like being able to read a book, being able to be patient, being able to communicate in person, and to hand-write. You know, that sort of ancient wisdom.

Edit for clarification.

Brace yourself for the day your kid comes home armed will rickrolls and starts muttering "deez nuts" under their breath. It's coming way WAY sooner than you think. ;)

No, they can do quite a lot, it's just VERY hard, for both the parents and the kids.

But if properly done, it can work. I was/have been the kid in this scenario, and now I'm being the parent and bracing for it.

Social pressure might be a tidal wave, you can either give up, or you can try to stand against it.

As we make parenting harder and harder in lots of creative and sadistic ways, more and more people are taking your advice. That’s got its own problems, it turns out.

> The recent proliferation of studies examining cross-national variation in the association between parenthood and happiness reveal accumulating evidence of lower levels of happiness among parents than nonparents in most advanced industrialized societies.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5222535/

I never saw myself as capable of withstanding the stress of parenting and so I never even really thought about having kids. I thought I was a far outlier, but, given trends in fertility, I think I may have just been early in realizing this.