SAN ANSELMO, CALIFORNIA – OCTOBER 04: In this photo illustration, the Facebook and Instagram apps are seen on the screen of an iPhone on October 04, 2021 in San Anselmo, California. Social media applications Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are experiencing a global outage that started before 9 a.m. (P.S.T.) on Monday morning. (Photo Illustration by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
Getty Images
There’s no “pause button” that can be pressed for parenting. Which is arguably why parenting is so fulfilling: the exhaustion it fosters is inversely proportional to the joy.
This is worth remembering as legislation on the state and national level rears its unfortunate head in the United States. As you’re reading this Sen. Ted Cruz (R – TX) is joining hands with Hawaiian Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI) to pass the Kids Off of Social Media Act (KOSA). The law prohibits social media companies from permitting anyone under the age of 13 to create an account on their sites.
Coming from Schatz, the legislation isn’t surprising. From Cruz, it’s man bites dog. Time was Republicans put family and parenting on a pedestal.
Implied in KOSA is that government can substitute itself for parents. Which means KOSA is a legislative version of government spending whereby the federal government, cheered on by an allegedly limited government U.S. Senator in Cruz, arrogates to itself parenting prerogative on the matter of social media usage. Which is the problem.
Young people don’t just require endlessly attentive parental oversight because they’re young, but also because it’s through constant attentiveness that parents convey to their children two crucial messages: first, that they’re very much cared for. Second, the values that parents hold dear. One guesses that Cruz would agree, which raises more questions about why he’s supporting legislation that puts a wedge between parents and their kids.
Seriously, wouldn’t life and parenting be exceedingly easy if politicians would simply write more laws meant to simplify parenting? If so, there would be lots of pause buttons throughout the day as government does for parents so that they don’t have to. Except that government can’t be our parent. One guesses that Cruz and Schatz both intuitively grasp the previous truth. The constancy of parenting is quite simply ingrained. Only for the practical realities of their legislation to worsen.
As a recent Wall Street Journal account of substantial social media usage by young people revealed, kids are quite savvy when it comes to technology. On its face, this is a good thing and it’s a reminder of why the young in commerce invariably lead us to a better place. Having grown up with technologies and comforts more broadly, they know their weaknesses and limits intimately, only for them disrupt or utterly improve them.
For evidence supporting the above truth, we turn to television. Long a medium populated by endlessly average offerings, now it’s better than ever. Those who grew up with it fixed it. Technology is no different. Kids see it more clearly than legislators and parents do.
The above can be found in recent efforts in Wichita, KS to limit online social media usage and screen-time broadly. They proved toothless. In the words of the Journal report, “Students found workarounds: logging out of their district accounts, sharing YouTube links in Google Slides and Docs other backdoors in.” The report indicated that Google had “fixed the Slides and Docs bug,” but to pretend that young people won’t find new workarounds isn’t just optimistic, it’s naïve.
Which is the point, and particularly it’s the point about Cruz and Schatz’s legislation. Kids are smarter and faster than governments trying to outfox them, and it’s not even close.
Yes, there’s no “pause button” in parenting. Which means Cruz and Schatz’s legislation doesn’t just insult parenting while creating a legislative wedge between parents and their children, it won’t just not work (see Wichita), it also fosters growing contempt for the law itself.