Do you genuinely not remember being a child?

tbf, when most of those posting here were children, access to smartphones/tablets with unrestricted internet connection wasn't a problem

but i do remember my parents actually raising me pretty hands-on, taking care of me not watching stuff I shouldn't be watching which of course existed and was easily available

Access to smartphones/tablets with unrestricted internet connection is only a problem today when parents give their children access to smartphones/tablets with unrestricted internet connections.

Cell phones and tablets don't spontaneously appear whenever a child wants one. Parents have the ability to hand devices over to children when they have time to watch them while they use it and remove those devices from them when they don't.

i 100% agree with you, but we cannot make the argument that the conditions were remotely comparable decades ago

they really weren't

> Parents have the ability to hand devices over to children when they have time to watch them while they use it and remove those devices from them when they don't.

Sure, if we assume the kids are kept in a locked box at all times, I suppose.

What about when they go to school and use internet devices there? Some of them are even issuing personal laptops. Or they hang out with their friends or go to the library or visit a pc cafe (a bit rare in america, but still...)

Even beyond that, exactly how often are you monitoring what they do at home? Are you watching over their shoulder every hour they have access to an internet device?

Like, kids have been smoking/drinking/having sex/etc while their parents are ignorant for 100s of years, what makes you think parents are suddenly going to be able to supervise all internet access?

When I was a child we didn't even have wifi of any kind and I still did things like sneak down to the family desktop after my parents went to sleep and "surf the web".

None of this is to say that we should created nanny-net that controls the entire internet in the hopes of protecting children, but there's a lot of room between that and doing literally nothing.

I'm reminded of fairly recent efforts to strongly discourage people smoking in movies/tv and banning actual advertising and how effective that was at decreasing the population of smokers, at least until vaping came along.

The point is sometimes we can identify seemingly small areas that will make a large impact and take action there.

Yes.

So you want all parents to be helicopter parents?

Don't buy your kid a cell phone/tablet and tell them to go play outside. simple as.

You don't have to helicopter if they don't have electronics 24/7.

It's an actual choice:

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/11/fashion/steve-jobs-apple-...

How many kids do you have? What software do you use for this continuous monitoring? How do you balance spending 18 hours a day continuously monitoring your children, with also working full-time and being a human yourself? Please elaborate on your personal system because I think you could help out a lot of people.

I am strongly against this age verification, I think this is an absolutely, catastrophically terrible idea. However, I'm also a parent who has been in the trenches. This is a damn hard problem, and we will lose our access to computing and a relatively free internet if we just sit back and say that it's on parents and parents are stupid if they don't know how to solve this problem.

having children is a choice. Therefore, the difficulty of that choice is not really a factor in our lawmaking nor should it be.

Is it, though? The trajectory right now is to remove the choice of parenthood. If some people in power have their way, it will not only be illegal to end a pregnancy, it will also be illegal to prevent it to start with. If a male and female have sex (and I doubt a sufficient number of people will give up having hetero sex), the result will often be a child, and there will be no safe, legal choice in the matter.

I certainly want people to have easy access to contraception and abortion. However, I also think that it's still a choice. I never said it was a good one (I agree, you'd be hard pressed to stop folks from having sex)

If we make laws that make it impractical to have children, I'm sure this will have no consequences for the country's future.

no one said anything about making laws making it more difficult to have children - and laws like age requirements don't make it easier, either

societally having children is not a choice

I have 2 kids. I choose to limit when they have access to electronics and monitor when they do.

No software is going to stop kids with constant access to electronics, kids are resourceful.

It's a choice, there's no getting around that.