During the graduation season that just passed, a sign at a nearby gas station flashed a message on its digital screen for graduating high school seniors: “Make Good Choices.” Better advice for anyone, whether young or old, would be hard to find.
What’s important about the advice, but also rather obvious, is that it took no legislation to get the message to the graduates. Instead, the gas station’s owner simply has common sense. Good choices are just that, and they’ll overwhelm all sorts of other bad advice, learning, or exposure.
The powerful truth about good choices came to mind while reading a New York Times account of certain parents taking their activism to Washington, and in particular, parents lobbying Congress to pass the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA). Reading about these parents, it was difficult to not conclude that they were and are taking the undeniable struggles of parenting to Washington with an eye on having them legislated away. Which says something.
It says that as opposed to the KOSA actually accomplishing anything related to improving child safety, it’s actually parents unwittingly attempting to offload the very real struggles of parenting to lawmakers. Which is a bad choice, and that’s not a political statement. Hopefully readers know why. A law can’t be a parent, and it can’t force wise decisions. Only for it to get more troubling.
To see why, consider the tragedy endured by one mother in the Times story. She’s described as a “fixture” in Washington given her dogged pursuit of legislation meant to make the online experience safer. What brought her to this point in undeniably awful. Her daughter had been “cyberbullied on Snapchat,” she’d been “raped by a boy she had met online,” and then she died at age 18 after taking “fentanyl-laced drugs bought on Facebook.” To be clear, what happened is tragic.
At the same time, it would be equally tragic and mistaken to blame the internet for what happened. As the adults reading this opinion piece, and who in some instances grew up in the pre-Internet age know very well, bullying is as old as childhood, and realistically adulthood. It did not begin with online communication. Arguably it was worse before online because it was much more person-to-person, and physical.
Horrible things like rape and molestation similarly didn’t begin with the internet. Fallen Angel was a 1981 television film about a child made lonely by her widowed mother’s relationship with a family friend, only for the child to fall under the spell of predator who worked in child pornography. Parents made their kids watch it at the time (including my own) as a way of warning their kids about the sometimes bad intentions of adults.
As for drug use and access, it’s no insight to point out that the internet wasn’t the pathway for drugs finding their way to young people. So while some are no doubt accessing dangerous substances online now, to blame the internet, online communication, or Facebook brings new meaning to non sequitur. The internet doesn’t kill, but drugs can.
Which is why it’s the job of parents, not Congress to keep a close eye on their kids. Yet KOSA to varying degrees shifts child protection to Congress. The Times reports that the law “would require social media, gaming and messaging apps to limit features that could heighten depression or bullying or lead to sexual exploitation.” Which wouldn’t change anything. Think about it.
As is, social media, gaming and messaging apps already have a vested interest in the health and wellbeing of their users since as ad-supported sites for the most part, they wouldn’t have ad buyers if it were known that use of the sites irretrievably damaged the users. Which is yet another reminder that it’s not social media or online activity imperiling young people, rather it’s mistakes, including mistakes borne of faulty parental supervision. There ought to be a law? No.
Common sense tells us Congress can’t fix what ails us, whether young or old. Only good choices can, and those don’t require legislation.
Republished from RealClear Markets