When it comes to online safety, parents must parent, not look to the government.
The politically engaged members of Generation Z have undertaken to instruct the nation as to the proper regulation of technologies such as smartphones, social media, and artificial intelligence. Some argue that lawmakers have failed to mitigate the social and psychological damage the internet is said to have wrought; others, that the fretting of techno-pessimists discounts the desires, cultural sensibility, and common sense of the digitally reared generation. Despite their apparent divergences, many of these arguments amount to a simple, familiar, perennial sentiment: you old folks just don’t get us.
I, too, am a child of the digital age. But I do not say I speak for anyone but myself, and I do not address myself to lawmakers or my siblings of this age. Indeed, I have nothing much to say here about public policy or the merits and demerits of the arguments propounded by certain self-appointed spokesmen of Gen Z. I will, instead, offer observations about my upbringing, during which my parents kept me from the all-too-public and often soul-sucking and all-consuming digital world. Having little interest in speaking to the Youth, I speak to parents: You have everything you need to keep your children safe online.
“Every parent I know is concerned about the online threats to kids,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) said in January. Parents ought to worry about children who spend their time profligately on social media, encounter perverts and predators on adult-occupied digital platforms, or disappear from real life or friendships in favor of digital experiences. But parents need not wait — indeed, they are duty-bound not to wait — for lawmakers to craft and enact so-called child-safety legislation. Parents have at their fingertips — literally — the digital controls needed to supervise and govern their children’s online lives; that is, to protect their children in a new, digital age. (RELATED: Britain’s Online Safety Act Might Come to America)
On my 13th birthday, I received my first cell phone, one which resembled the telegraph more than the iPhone. For some years after, I had no portal to the internet besides my parents’ computer, when my brother gave me a hand-me-down laptop (it worked as smoothly as Joe Biden rides a bicycle). I did not have a smartphone until my mid-teenage years, and I was forbidden from social media until age 17 and a half. In short, the internet was largely closed to me until I became an adult.
I relate all this to demonstrate that parents can — and ought to — employ an underutilized word: No.
My parents did not bar my access to technology without protest (I certainly protested). Nor was I enmeshed in a social group of friends whose parents restricted their digital lives as my parents restricted mine. They endured the ordinary slings and arrows that spring, almost unprovoked, from frustrated teenage boys. No, they had an out-of-the-ordinary conception of my good, and they enforced — compassionately, but unyieldingly.
Parents Have Everything They Need to Keep Their Children Safe Online
No is a powerful word.