VAIL, CO – JUNE 9, 2017: Two teenage boys use their smartphones as they sit on a bench in Vail, Colorado. (Photo by Robert Alexander/Getty Images)
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With kids, it’s all about quantity time. Parents intuitively know this because they know how much their kids value time with them. It’s a reminder that, as the title of this opinion piece indicates, a parental focus on “quality time” is a bit of a copout.
About what you’ve just read, it shouldn’t be construed as an attack on parents for whom quality time is the only parental option. Some parents are legitimately stretched with work and other time constraints that render time with the kids a challenge. What you’re about to read isn’t a critique of them.
At the same time, it is a critique of App Store Age Verification measures making their way not just through Congress, but in a variety of state legislatures across the country. Proposed App Store Age Verification laws are the legal manifestation of the false notion that the act of parenting can be mailed in, or limited to “quality time.” Implicit in the legislation is that governments, by writing laws, can save parents from the endlessly challenging work of parenting.
If so, “big corporations” like Apple and Google will be forced to check the proverbial ID remotely to allegedly keep kids under certain ages from accessing apps and games that they shouldn’t necessarily be seeing, watching movies and television shows that are too old for them, along with receiving pictures and messages that well exceed their maturity level.
It all sounds so great at first glance until we remember that parenting is full-time for a reason, and not just because kids and pre-teens require a lot of watching. It’s also through the quantity time approach to parenting that parents convey to their kids their values, but much more importantly, how much they value the well-being of their children.
App Store Age Verification measures trample on this. They imply that quality parental outcomes can be achieved by counting heads in state and national capitols. Which means legislation like App Store Age Verification would be bad even if it were “good” in the sense that mere laws resulted in amazing parental outcomes born of kids doing the right things out of respect for the law. That’s because the value of parenting is in the tirelessness of it, and once again what the latter conveys to kids about the importance of good behavior.
Furthermore, it’s easy to forget when considering the somewhat uniform App Store Age Verification legislation that it achieves less than nothing. If readers doubt it, they need only purchase Apple or Google devices for their kids, or they need only ask other parents who’ve already done so.
Precisely because no corporation gains by putting kids in harm’s way, Apple and Google devices are dense with all manner of barriers to kids accessing what they shouldn’t, as in the devices are set up so that kids can only add apps or games with parental permission, screen time is similarly a prerogative of parents who not only control time and content, but also the times of day when the content is viewed. As for ingoing and outgoing messages and pictures, nudes are blurred either way, messages from older people are blocked, and parents are constantly informed of what’s being seen or not.
Which is the point. Implied in Google and Apple’s empowerment of parents is the basic truth that quantity time paired with routine parental oversight is what works for kids. Laws, exactly because they imply that parents aren’t necessary on the matter of successful online experiences, are much worse than excess.