After a day of skiing in December, my then-13-year-old son made a pitch to me while we were sitting in a hot tub in Colorado. Surrounded by knee-deep snow, he asked if I would let him have his first social media app, SnapChat.
The price? He was willing to run a lap around the house through four snow drifts on his way back to the hot tub. His protection from the stinging winter wind? His bathing suit.
We shook on it because I couldn’t imagine he would make it halfway. No way he would suffer that much for an app.
Ninety seconds later he rounded the corner of the house, his knees popping up like pistons out of the snow. “I did it,” he said, arriving back at the hot tub with a grin. “Now you have to give it to me. You promised.”
Kids want these apps badly.
While I am more stubborn than most fellow parents about delaying our kids having social media, I caved to my son with that snowy hot tub bet. I allowed him to have social media before the landmark date that I originally had set: entrance to high school. We parents struggle to hold the line.
Enter an unlikely hero: conservative state legislatures.
The surge of harmful lawmaking in conservative states, including Kansas, in the last few months has many people wincing when they hear that legislation has been passed in states like Arkansas and Utah.
That is the reputation that Arkansas has earned with a bill restricting classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender-affirming care, while Utah’s legislature passed a bill to close all abortion clinics in the state.
I’m here to showcase a counterweight to those ill-conceived restrictions: laws passed in both Arkansas and Utah that reset the conversation about social media and kids. These laws — while not perfect — are progress.
Utah’s legislation was the first. Republican Gov. Spencer Cox signed bills into law on March 23 that will:
• Prohibit social media use for children under 18 unless parents or guardians make changes to their kids’ settings
• Require age verification for anyone who wants to use social media in the state
• Prevent tech companies from including addictive features in social media
Reporting — even by the Associated Press — has been a bit misleading about the Utah law. The story simply says that overnight hours are prohibited times for social media, ignoring that parents can set different hours. That is smart flexibility to put in parents’ hands.
