Australia has banned kids under 16 from social media, leading an international trend. Politicians such as Democratic presidential hopeful Rahm Emanuel and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) say the United States should join it. Their advocacy reflects a growing consensus that social media’s negative effects on kids’ mental health and social lives outweigh the benefits. Most American adults now agree that the platforms should require age verification, according to a survey taken in October.
Psychologists Jonathan Haidt and Ravi Iyer argue that governments should not only legislate an under-16 ban, but provide no parental opt-out: “Don’t make parents’ jobs even harder by giving their kids one more thing to beg for.”
That argument will draw an immediate objection. Parents have the primary responsibility for protecting kids from threats — online and offline — to their physical safety, mental health and moral development. Discharging that duty requires that they be able to say no to their children — even when all their friends’ parents have said yes and even when they beg. Parents have the power today, all on their own, to tell their kids to stay off social media, delay buying them phones or buy ones that can’t download apps. (My family implemented the first two options.)
Opponents of age restrictions on social media take a strong view of parental rights: Because it’s the parents’ job to regulate children’s internet usage, the government has no legitimate role here. That’s the position of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, for example. Tech executive Rick Song, similarly calls “the risks of social media” to kids “a household-level problem.”
Though the argument that parents should be in charge has some force, treating parental rights as a near-absolute principle that rules out most governmental efforts to protect kids goes too far. Governments routinely use their powers in ways that could be said to infringe parents’ rights but are more commonly understood as helping parents. Many of these policies are not controversial.
Society doesn’t let parents assess their children’s maturity and competence and then set individualized ages for buying liquor, cigarettes, or guns, going to casinos, or driving cars. Even places that have legalized marijuana make exceptions for kids. Parents can’t legally opt their children out of seat belt laws or send them to work in factories. We use zoning laws to keep strip clubs away from schools and playgrounds, instead of asking parents to issue stern warnings about how to walk home. “Most States,” the Supreme Court observed last year in a Texas case, “require age verification for in-person purchases of sexual material.”
These policies aid parents in multiple ways: letting them monitor their children less intensively, encouraging the formation and maintenance of helpful social norms and solving collective-action problems. (“Justin’s mom lets him smoke!” is, mercifully, not something parents have to deal with.) The lack of formal opt-outs to most of these policies makes them more effective in achieving their purposes.
Policies intended to promote children’s safety are sometimes unwise. Melissa Moschella, a philosophy professor at the University of Notre Dame who has written a book defending parental rights, condemns “strict age limits on when you’re allowed to leave a child at home alone or play unsupervised.” Relaxing such limits would both respect parents and help children grow up.
Whether a particular policy does more to help or hurt families is, though, a question of prudence. For Moschella, social media age limits — such as prohibitions on contracts in which minors under 16 let Meta and its counterparts collect data on them — fall on the right side of the line. “These laws don’t limit what parents can expose their children to if they want,” she tells me. They may, however, change the platforms’ behavior: “Right now, all of the financial incentives for these companies are to capture children’s attention.” Doing so is central to their business model.
The country has already, in principle, acceded to age-based regulations on the internet. They have been in federal law since 1998, restricting how websites can collect personal information from children under 13. Many social media sites adopted that age limit in their stated policies in response to the law. What reformers are proposing is raising the age and adding teeth to the restrictions. How to make an age limit enforceable without compromising adults’ privacy or data security is a much-debated question. Courts will undoubtedly review age limits, although the Supreme Court, with its decision in the Texas case upholding a state law requiring age verification for online pornography, may have strengthened the case that they are constitutional.
The practical and legal issues are important. But legislators should not worry that age limits will detract from parents’ indispensable role in raising children. As the polls indicate, what parents actually want is help in protecting their kids from the designs of the tech companies.
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