Recently, states including Arkansas, Utah, and Texas have proposed laws requiring anyone under 18 to get parental permission to use social media. Some of these new laws would also enable parents to limit the number of hours their kids can spend on a platform. Lawmakers who favor these restrictions say teens need to be shielded from harmful and inappropriate content on social media. But critics say these laws would violate teens’ privacy. They also believe these laws could potentially hurt teens by limiting their access to helpful information. What do you think? Should you need your parent’s consent to use social media?
Subscriber Only Resources
Access this article and hundreds more like it with a subscription to Choices magazine.
Should Parents Control Social Media?
Yes
Yes, parents should have control over their children’s social media. Teens are easy targets for algorithms designed to make us addicted to social media. We’re also vulnerable to content that is bad for our mental health. I’ve seen this play out in my own social circle. For example, one of my friends developed a social media addiction and began spending up to 12 hours a day on social media apps. Another friend started looking at hateful content during a bad time in his life. This isn’t to say that social media is always harmful to teens, but it can easily distort our sense of reality. While there might not be any foolproof way to keep teens completely safe on social media, allowing parents to monitor and place limits on their children’s involvement is a good place to start.
—Tabor Axelrod Paoli, New York
No
No, parents should not control teens’ social media. I understand that these laws are intended to protect minors from inappropriate content. But there would be drawbacks for kids whose parents censor important information about health or current events. Social media might be the only place these kids could get useful information about their lives. Additionally, these laws will likely create distrust between teens and parents. Some kids might even find ways to create secret accounts. If parents control teens’ access to social media, teens’ relationship with their parents could suffer, and they might also lose out on valuable learning opportunities. Teens need the freedom to navigate social media on their own. If they do make mistakes online, they can learn from those mistakes.
—Amaanya Gandhi, California
Text-to-Speech