They need protection from technology’s potential harms. They need protection from government do-gooders even more.
Originally published in The Wall Street Journal.
I have seven kids. The oldest is 10, the youngest is brand-spanking new. When I look at the future my kids will face, one of my big worries is technology. My wife and I refuse to let our children have unfettered access to screens of any kind. We’ve seen how social media can destroy self-esteem. We know that cellphones can steal your childhood. And artificial intelligence? It comes with risks, as many kids are discovering.
Yet as much as I want to protect my kids from technology’s potential harms, I need to protect them from do-gooders in government even more. I am unwilling to cede my parental decision-making to politicians who don’t know my children and increasingly seem convinced that I am incapable of deciding what’s best for my own family.
This distrust of parents is showing up in statehouses across the country. In Utah, lawmakers have pushed age-verification regimes and proposals to shift responsibility for children’s online access to app stores. In Tennessee and Arkansas, legislators have advanced laws limiting how minors can access social media—some already struck down for overreach, others still being tested. In Mississippi, similar efforts are under way. Now this approach is bleeding into broader proposals around artificial intelligence, with many policies taking shape.
The chattering class is fully on board with the notion that politicians, not parents, know what’s best for kids—even among conservatives who have long opposed state intrusion into family life. In First Things, Clare Morell recently argued that “protecting kids online doesn’t threaten speech or parental rights.” Conservatives are framing these policies as a matter of helping parents. In fact, they are replacing parents.
No one has done more to shape conservative support for technology bans than a self-acknowledged liberal: Jonathan Haidt. His argument isn’t that parents don’t matter, but that they can’t succeed on their own. He thinks there’s a collective-action problem: Even well-intentioned parents lose when every other child is on the platform. Social pressure, network effects and engineered engagement overwhelm individual choice.
But once you accept that framing, parental consent stops looking like the primary safeguard of child welfare, and instead becomes an unfortunate loophole. If the problem is collective, then individual parental decisions become part of the problem rather than the solution. And from there, the conclusion follows naturally: Authority must shift upward to platforms and regulators.
I am unwilling to cede my responsibilities as a father to those with less knowledge, weaker incentives and no direct accountability to me and my children. That doesn’t lead to better parenting. It empowers worse decision makers. And once you build machinery to accomplish this—surveillance systems, centralized age gates, institutional vetoes over ordinary household decisions—it will expand.
You can already see it happening. What begins with social-media restrictions is evolving into broader proposals about AI access, identity verification, platform-level controls that apply across categories of technology, and banning entire technologies based on age. The logic is the same: If parents can’t manage one class of tools, they likely can’t manage the next.
Some parents fail at keeping their kids safe in our increasingly technological world. No parent is perfect. But that doesn’t mean we should replace parental judgment with policy judgment. That normalizes a different model of childhood—one governed less by families and more by institutions that claim superior insight but lack direct responsibility.
There is a better path that respects both family and freedom. Enforce existing rules against deception, coercion and exploitation. Give parents real visibility and tools they can actually use. In my home, we don’t allow our children on social media or let them have cellphones. But we do help our kids use AI as an instrument for their own growth and self-discovery. Over the past year, my 10-year-old son has used ChatGPT, Claude, Suno and Gemini to create an entire fantasy world where his siblings are the main characters. I helped guide the process, protecting my child every step of the way.
Many other families differ in their approaches. Some inevitably fall short. That isn’t a flaw but a hallmark of a free society. The question isn’t whether children will encounter powerful technologies. The question is whether they encounter them as people formed by parents or as wards of systems built by those who never trusted their parents to begin with.