Parents Need Better Laws to Back Them Up
On July 8, I delivered a talk at the National Conservatism conference titled “Parents Need Better Laws to Back Them Up” that explained why in order to effectively protect America’s kids from the harms of Big Tech and Big Porn, parents need lawmakers to step up and pass laws that will back them up. Leaving it up to parents on their own isn’t enough. You can watch my talk here and see my full remarks below:
“The most ideal government on earth is the limited, self-governing republic. And the endurance of a self-governing republic depends on a virtuous, flourishing citizenry. History and experience teach us that virtuous citizens are formed by families and religious communities and the relationships of love and mutual responsibility they create.
That means what parents want for their kids is also what’s best for the nation: free and virtuous women and men who will be contributing members of society, who will make their country a better place, and who are qualified to serve as leaders.
Big Tech companies are working to form a different kind of person. They want children to hand over as much of their time, attention, and data as possible. Smartphones and social media are not designed to be used responsibly: they are designed to overpower our self-control and turn us into unthinking, dopamine-addicted users.
That means parents are in a competition with Big Tech companies, and whoever wins that competition is going to determine what kinds of people are formed and therefore what kind of nation we become. But parents can’t win this competition on their own: they don’t have meaningful control over the technology, and many harms children suffer from digital media are collective in nature.
Parents need help. They need better laws to back them up. And the good news is that lawmakers are starting to pass such laws. They are putting power back into parents’ hands. But before we get there, let's briefly reframe the problem of digital technology to clarify what policy solutions we need to protect America’s children.
The problem with digital technologies is much deeper than the spiking rates of teen anxiety, depression, and self-harm. These are real concerns, and it is appropriate that so much attention is being given to the teen mental health crisis. But they are only symptoms of a much greater spiritual disease afflicting us—and afflicting childhood. The nature of these technologies, and the virtual world they create, is a threat to the core of our humanity and flourishing. Screens and their apps habituate children towards an inhumane way of life.
The character traits that are adaptive for the online world are maladaptive for the real world. Technology creates dependence and addiction, instead of independence and freedom. It rewards and celebrates self-focus and self-expression rather than responsibility and service to others. It is a world built on metrics, “likes,” reshares, and superficial connections instead of friendship, trust, and conversation. It trains our brains to skim and switch between tasks instead of focusing, reading deeply, and thinking complexly. It wires us for consumption instead of production. It trains us to be mindlessly entertained and amused, instead of fostering our creativity and problem-solving abilities.
Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, published in 1985 in the era of television, has proved scarily prescient: today children are literally scrolling themselves to death.
This is all by design. Mark Zuckerberg himself admitted in a recent Senate hearing that he wants children to spend more, not less, time on Meta’s products. Their business model is predatory and children’s developing brains are particularly vulnerable to their products’ dopamine-inducing features. And dopamine does not create satisfaction or lasting pleasure; it only produces craving. The means have become the ends. The virtual world is now more reality for children than real life. They are losing their agency and freedom.
The design of the apps also habituates children toward vices rather than virtue. Reports have shown how algorithms quickly pull kids down dangerous rabbit holes of drug-related or sexual content, like "KinkTok," which features whips, chains, and torture devices. Kids don’t need to go looking for porn on the web; it finds them on social media.
The medium is the message. Social media creates an environment that incentivizes teens to post suggestive and sexualized photos of themselves or to participate in illicit sexual activities online in order to get more likes and followers. The entire atmosphere sends the message that sex is normal for children—including violent and aggressive sex—and that everyone is doing it.
Leah Plunkett, an assistant dean at Harvard Law School, explained that TikTok livestreams where viewers urge young girls to perform acts that toe the line of child pornography is the digital equivalent of going down the street to a strip club filled with 15-year-olds.
It’s no wonder that young boys are falling prey to sextortion schemes at alarming rates. Sending nudes to peers or engaging in sexual interactions online has become so normalized for teens today.
It’s not just social media. Even app stores are promoting material that is harmful for children. One mom of five told me whenever she opens the App Store for her 10-year-old, it tells him that his "must-have" apps are Tinder, TikTok, Hinge, and Bumble.
Scarily enough, the advertising is working. According to one study, one in four 9 to 12-year-old boys reported they have been on an online dating app, where they are interacting with adults looking for romantic partners.
Online exposure has real-world impacts. “Likes” on social media have been found to reduce kids’ natural inhibition towards dangerous and illegal behavior. One study found that teens’ exposure to “liked” posts of alcohol use predicted these same teens’ early engagement in heavy episodic drinking.
Nurses, doctors, teachers, and principals are seeing children acting out sexual content they have consumed online. ERs are handling cases of 4 to 8 year old girls who have been violently sexually assaulted by 11 and 12 year-old boys. Given what we know about the internet and about child development, are we really permitted to be surprised?
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Hear this. The great digital paradox is that children are being exposed to sexual, adult content more than ever before in human history. They carry it with them in their pockets 24/7. And yet at the same time children have never been less prepared to handle it. The design of the technology is stunting children’s ability to develop into mature adults with self-control.
We know there is a problem; but leaving the solution up to parents isn’t enough. Most parents recognize and are concerned about protecting their kids from these harms. But we have all been told by Big Tech companies, as well as their Libertarian allies, the media, and even pediatricians, that parents on their own can mitigate or avoid these harms with screen time limits and parental controls.
These harm reduction measures aren’t working.
First, the parental “controls” apps offer really only allow parents to set time limits or privacy settings. And their kids need to grant the parent permission first. Kids can also change the apps’ privacy settings themselves at any time: that it’s called a control is laughable.
Even more frustrating, external parental control apps and filters that parents can purchase don’t have access to the content and messages inside of the apps.
All this means parents can’t see what their children are actually seeing or doing on these platforms. They are flying blind. And while filters can block inappropriate content or sites on a web browser, when a child can get to PornHub inside Snapchat, without ever leaving the app, the filter becomes meaningless.
Screen time limits are another suggestion pushed on parents to curtail kids’ use of social media. But the reality is that they are wholly insufficient. In even a short amount of time on an app or device a child can be exposed to harmful material or dangerous strangers. And even if a child is only on social media for 15 minutes a day, the craving it creates means they are mentally consumed by what’s happening on the app even when they aren’t actively using it. And it means the limit is never enough, resulting in a hundred screen time battles a day.
The end result is that parents are extremely frustrated and exhausted, and kids aren’t effectively shielded from harm. It’s a lose-lose situation.
Even if a parent decides to keep their child off of social media entirely―which I encourage parents to do in my forthcoming book, The Tech Exit―parents still aren’t completely in the driver’s seat. Determined kids can too easily go behind their parents back to create accounts. All they have to do is enter a false birth date, check a box, and they’re on. There is no parental involvement required.
And finally, not every child comes from a home with loving, involved parents. In fact, there is a screen-time disparity. One survey found that kids from lower socioeconomic families spend on average 8 hours and 32 minutes a day on screens, which is 2 hours more than kids from higher-income families.
Historically, when we have recognized something is so harmful and dangerous to children, like alcohol or tobacco or gambling, that it shouldn’t be left up to individual parents to regulate, the government sets age limits and restrictions for the common good. Such collective solutions are needed now to restrict digital technology in order to ensure the next generation can become free and virtuous citizens.
Unless and until Congress restricts these technologies out of childhood entirely, parents are on the frontlines in the fight for our nation. And they need support.
Thankfully, states are stepping up. We have solutions that work.
First, states are passing parental consent laws for social media that put authority over children’s online behavior back in the hands of parents.
This is an idea that I, along with Adam Candeub, Jean Twenge, and Brad Wilcox put forth in a report for states in fall of 2022. Utah became the first state to adopt our proposal in 2023 and now eight states in total have passed such laws.
These parental consent laws require internet companies to verify a user’s age and, if the user is a minor, to obtain verifiable parental consent before allowing a minor to form an account. This is an innovative solution that draws on contract law. Creating a social media account and agreeing to its terms of service is like entering a contract. As a general legal rule, minors lack the capacity to form contracts, which means parental consent is necessary.
These laws also crucially include age-verification requirements, which underscores how any solutions to age restrict social media must be tied to meaningful age verification, so that a child cannot just enter a birthdate or check a box and easily falsify their age. I won’t get into the technical details here, but if you are interested in this topic I would refer you to reports I’ve written available on my EPPC scholar page. But know that it is possible for age-verification to be done in a way that is both effective at keeping minors off and protective of adult privacy. Don’t believe the lies of Big Tech that say otherwise.
Secondly, Adam, Ryan, and I, and many others, have also been involved in efforts to help states pass age-verification for porn sites laws. These laws require websites that publish a certain amount of "sexual material harmful to minors" must verify that users attempting to access the site are at least 18 years old.
Louisiana led the way in 2022 and over 12 other states have followed suit. As more laws have passed, PornHub has dropped out of more and more states and ceased doing business entirely in seven states.
These laws are having an impact.
My friends will talk more about the constitutionality of these two kinds of laws, but the point I want to leave you with is that in order to raise free and virtuous citizens for the future, parents need help to protect their children from the harms of digital technologies—and fortunately lawmakers are doing it.
We need more to join them. We need to advocate for Congress to restrict social media out of childhood entirely, for states to pass parental consent laws for social media and age-verification laws for porn sites, and for schools to ban phones. All of which I hope we’ll discuss more in the Q&A.
Protecting kids from digital harm is a winning issue and time is of the essence.
Thank you.