Honestly, THE problem with children online is PARENTS
Namely, parents that will continue to ignore the only real solution.
Problem 1: social media is like swaddling, minus the "IFs"
Swaddling is the practice to wrap infants in tightly restricting blankets:
Parents, midwives, shamans and then pediatricians have practiced and recommended swaddling for millennia as harmless, if not beneficial... until a few decades ago, when it became clear that it may be quite harmful, if done wrong.
Social Media, the Web and children went through a similar path, just 400 times faster and, as of mid-2023, almost surely without any "may" or "if":
Depression and other mental illnesses have always afflicted children and teenagers. In 2023, however, it is unacceptable to ignore that:
decline of young people's mental health has been accelerating for at least a decade, worldwide
while COVID-19 certainly didn't help, a major, if not the main cause of that acceleration is exactly the worldwide swaddling of children in social media and other online activities that started around 2012
Don't trust me on this, but do read ALL the evidence linked at the bottom of this article before questioning it.
Problem 2: online, children swaddle themselves as they damn please
As things stand today, teenagers, preteens and children as young as 7 can merrily "get around every single setting and roadblock available to parents", to access anything they want, from likely harmless transgressions:
to actual dangers, from potentially any place:
Also, as things stand now, platforms cannot be trusted. Stuff like "allowing up to 1.4 million UK children under 13 to use its platform in 2020, despite its own rules not allowing children that age to create an account", that costed TikTok £12.7 million in April 2023 could happen again, everywhere.
That's why we have calls and proposals like these:
Fact is, initiatives like those are Rube Goldberg solutions that cannot work, and aimed at the wrong people too.
The Rube Goldberg solutions
Age verification and parental consent that work are very difficult problems online. They require collecting very sensitive data and storing them in many uncontrollable places all over the world, possibly with absent, unenforceable or contradictory laws. After making sure that those data are correct, of course. How do you do that?
Everybody knows that any form of online self-certification would be a joke. But I have seen all sorts of experts, including university professors, spend precious time to illustrate and compare solutions based on any combination of:
Document collection, that is binding account creation to scanning and upload of identity cards or equivalent documents
Facial recognition, or other biometrics checks of the user asking for an account
(of course) Artificial intelligence (AI), to analyze in real time what users say, watch, share or download, in order to infer their age and, if that looks lower than it should, ban them right away
Explicit, verifiable parental consent
The truth is that, besides being really really expensive, all these "solutions" create more problems than they solve.Even if they could work as advertised, which they just can’t.
Parental consent just moves all the other issues on proper identification of the parent. Document collection means indiscriminate dissemination of sensitive data all over the internet, that is huge privacy and surveillance issues, plus mass identity thefts when (not "if") some repository is violated. Biometrics would be the same, just much worse. AI could work, but only in the sense that automatic bans of whoever looks like an immature child would kick offline almost every social media user, not just children. Arguably good, overall, but hardly what we are looking for here.
The overdue recognition
Enough with fairy tales about "digital natives" and Dunning-Kruger self-delusions by parents. Isn't it obvious by now, beyond any reasonable doubt, that:
the only innate "digital skill" you can be sure almost every child under 14 has is the ability to bypass parental controls?
At least 95% of today's real parents do not have anywhere near the adequate combination of real digital skills and spare time to assist their children whenever they go online?
Be honest: if the average adult of today were capable of teaching how to live with social media to anybody, would fake news or cyberbullying be the issues they are?
Besides, what good would it be for your child, if he were the only one non smoking in a crowded room? Cyberbullying and many other digital risks are like second-hand smoking: even if YOU belonged to that 5% of blessed parents, you’d still need every child around yours to behave.
In other words, dear parents of this century, it's high time to recognize and accept, without feeling personally guilty, another inconvenient truth:
we as a SPECIES have already done a colossal, really era-defining screwup to let children roam online alone non-stop, and will only make it worse by demanding the wrong solutions from the wrong people.
The root problem, that is the wrong equation
Real media/digital literacy has nothing to do with uncontrollable private, 24x7x365 access for children. The former is surely good, and the sooner all children acquire it the better, but it doesn't need the latter at all. In this picture, online identification schemes are as useful as closing the stable door after the horse has bolted.
The terribly simple, terribly wrong equation that is screwing children and parents is this:
digital skills = must have PERSONAL smartphone, asap
This is so technically wrong that I can’t believe I have to spell it.
Just forget online, that is "post-escape" identification. At least 80% of this whole mess only exists because everybody accepts as religious dogma, or laws of physics, that children must have their own smartphone years before they are 14, if not 10. Is this really that difficult to get, and accept?
Seriously: if even parents who bring their 6-year old children to “gun school” would never “leave a real gun laying around”, why on Earth children still forbidden from slicing bread, buying groceries or even crossing the street alone MUST get the ONLY "authorization" they actually need to:
access the whole Internet...
anytime anywhere, alone, that is in what is EXACTLY the riskiest way of all, and the most sleep-depriving too?
How can this really Orwellian doublethink continue, with all we know now?
The real solution
Document collection, facial recognition, Artificial Intelligence...What's next, Albus Dumbledore's Age line around the Goblet of Fire?
NO. Just say NO. Enough of this crap. There is only one solution that is really feasible and really works here, and only one "organization" that can implement it, and it's NOT governments, or schools.
Parents, stop worrying about parental control, filters, passcodes and restricted apps NOW. Forget believing you could or should ever “handle this myself” with any mix of digital “tech” and discourse. Just tell Junior that next Christmas he'll get something of equal value, but NOT his first smartphone. Just RELAX, for heaven’s sake.
The real and only solution is this, and you won’t believe how much you’ll like it:
1: No personal, internet-capable mobile device before age 14. Period. End of story (a).
2: Bottom-up social pressure, as below
Homework, videogames, videocalls and what not can happen in the living room, obviously before dinner, on a desktop computer or other shared, not personal device (b).
The only real fault of this solution is that it lowers GDP, instead of increasing it like all the others. Rats, that a showstopper, isn't it?
Who should do this? Easy!
Governments must just stay out of this, because anything they could do would be a hugely expensive surveillance nightmare that would not work anyway. Ditto for schools. The only ones who can and must implement this solution, and can start doing it yesterday at no cost, are parents. ALL of them (remember that second-hand smoking thing?).
Social pressure, please
If you saw someone handling a child a cigarette or a bottle of booze, wouldn’t you at least scowl at him, and pity the poor child? PERSONAL smartphones in the hands of children must go the same way.
Forget AI and biometrics. Imagine school meetings where almost all parents look with contempt to the few of them who still let their under-14 children alone with a PERSONAL smartphone. Imagine a fourth-grader entering class with the iPhone she just got for her birthday, just to be greeted by "gee, your parents don't want to look you eye to eye anymore, don't they?".
Extreme? Radical? Compared to today yes, but only because extreme and radical is the stupidity we’ve been all tricked into doing for a decade now. If you still need convincing, read the articles below, and their sources, but resist personal smartphones for children NOW. Don't be afraid. Good and stranger things have happened. You won’t be alone.
Last but not least...
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(a) Good old cellphones physically incompatible with anything digital, photography and WhatsApp included, may be OK, but this is a topic for another day. While waiting for that, please check as appetizer the "Stranger Things" part of this other article
(b) of course, a child alone at home after school, because both parents work full time, will abuse a desktop computer just as she would a personal smartphone. But even so, doing it only at home, only a few hours before dinner, possibly on a shared account, would be a huge improvement compared to a smartphone
The evidence
Some Reasons Why Smartphones Might Make Adolescents Anxious and Depressed
Social Media is a Major Cause of the Mental Illness Epidemic in Teen Girls. Here's The Evidence.
Life online is choking smog. Teenagers need a place they can breathe
Teens' social media use should be monitored by parents, APA says
Kids who get smartphones earlier become adults with worse mental health
US surgeon general's advisory on risks of youth social media use
Not science, but still food for thought: celebrities who do NOT give smartphones to their kids:
Agreed!!
This is a terrific article, Marco. You are SPOT ON about how parents can solve the terrible problem we're facing with kids and phones/social media. Exactly!! Great list of sources, too. Enjoyed the read. And thanks again for commenting on my piece, "More Than They Can Handle" https://raisingamericans.substack.com/p/more-than-they-can-handle