Parents Have Everything They Need to Keep Their Children Safe Online | The American Spectator

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. (RELATED: Why Free Speech Needs Congressional Action)

“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.

Perhaps the pressures of the digital world have grown since my adolescence. Many parents report that denying their children popular technologies, such as social media, seems to be a sentence of social isolation. Yet, as difficulties mount, the digital safety tools available to parents become more formidable. Apple’s App Store and Google Play now provide prodigious suites of parental controls. A parent of a child with an iPhone can, inter alia, restrict downloads to explicitly approved applications, block explicit content in apps and on the open internet, enable maximal privacy protections, and limit communications to phone contacts — and approved contacts, at that. And besides the features developed by Apple and Google, a panoply of safety tools, applying to nearly every link of the chain of digital technology, is readily available. In short, parents can transform their child’s device into, so to speak, a brick — provided they wish to do so. (RELATED: EU Censorship Metastasizes)

If something is to be said about public policy, it is this: many parents, including many worried about their children, do not know of these tools or are unaware of their power and the ease with which they can be used. Although lawmakers have obsessed over bills to regulate social media platforms, they have neglected to ensure that schools instruct students and their families in digital safety. Such states as Florida have not fallen short, and their digital-safety curricula have found success. “This curriculum builds lasting resilience by teaching students critical thinking skills for navigating online spaces safely, from cyberbullying to self-regulating social media use,” as put in a recent op-ed in the Tallahassee Democrat. In every aspect, Americans know that the raising of children ought to be done by parents — and that nobody possesses the knowledge, competence, or love to do it. The parenting of children’s digital lives does not deviate from this rule.

Children are the future, but that future is molded, for good and ill, by the decisions made in the present by their parents. American parents do not lack anything — besides knowledge, in many cases — to protect their offspring online. It is to parents that I, a child of the digital age, appeal. The buck does not stop in Washington, D.C., or in state legislatures, but at the kitchen table.

READ MORE from David B. McGarry:

Conservative Principles Lost in Tech Regulation

When Government Competes, America Loses

Why Free Speech Needs Congressional Action

David B. McGarry is the research director at the Taxpayers Protection Alliance.