News flash parents: You have considerable control over what your kid does

You can do this, this is not hard, just do it.

Maybe I’m missing something but this sort of thing never fails to completely baffle me:

Some prominent children’s advocacy, privacy and health groups want to ban user-engagement techniques that, they say, unfairly steer the behavior of minors and hijack their attention. On Thursday, a coalition of more than 20 groups filed a petition asking the Federal Trade Commission to prohibit video games like My Talking Tom, as well as social networks like TikTok and other online services, from employing certain attention-grabbing practices that may hook children online.

In particular, the groups asked regulators to prohibit online services from offering unpredictable rewards — a technique that slot machines use — to keep children online.

The groups also asked the agency to prohibit online services from using social-pressure techniques, like displaying the number of likes that children’s social media posts garner, and endless content feeds that may cause children to spend more time online than they may have wished.

Ha ha ha. I am being genuinely serious here: I have no idea what any of this means. “To keep children online.” “May hook children online.” “Spend more time online than they may have wished.” What the hell is the New York Times talking about? These are children. If parents don’t like how much time they are spending online they can just make them stop!

Seriously. Am I missing something here? Is this any more complicated than, “Tell your kid to stop spending so much time online, and if he doesn’t comply then take his phone away?” I mean, you can also just take his phone away altogether—he doesn’t need a smartphone, it’s ridiculous on so many levels that any child is given a smartphone—but if you’re not willing to do that, you can at least exercise considerable regulatory authority over his phone while he has it. And I mean it’s not complicated. You do not need a parenting how-to book or a six-week instructive course or anything. You just set rules and if the child does not follow them you enforce the consequences. It is so easy.

I sincerely can’t imagine how any parent could realistically object to that proposal. “I can’t control what he does on his phone while he’s in his room!” Um, okay: No smartphone allowed in room. Boom, done. “He takes it to school and I can’t control what he does there!” Yeah uh huh: No smartphone allowed at school. Boom, roasted. “He’s going to find a way around whatever rules I establish!” Buddy, I got a crackerjack proposal for you that will solve literally 100% of these problems: Take that smartphone away. Total, comprehensive solution. If your child must have a phone, get him a flipper. They still make those, there are many of them out there to choose from. (Believe me.) Nothing here is complicated and complex, it’s all very easy.

Anyway, beyond the weird weak-sauce parenting at play here, there’s something else instructive going on: This demonstrates rather comprehensively that chronic smartphone addiction is very much an inter-class phenomenon. I mean, look, I think we all sort of feel in our bones that we’re more likely to see kids staring vacantly down at phone screens in a Walmart shopping cart rather than a Whole Foods one (I say that as someone who shops a great deal more at Walmart than at Whole Foods). We tend to reflexively think that this kind of frightening declension of child development is restricted to a particular socio-economic strata, namely a lower one. But upon reflection we might remember that we see this sort of thing in all kids at every demographic level—it’s just everywhere now—and if more proof were needed it’s clearly to be found in “children’s advocacy, privacy and health groups” begging the federal government to do their parenting for them. I guarantee you the parents in charge of these groups are more likely to drive Volvos and Priuses than old Corollas and they’re more likely to eat at places that serve frisée salads rather than iceberg lettuce. You all know what I mean, no need to get huffy about it.

And yet these moms and dads are still apparently incapable of figuring out how to stop their children from being on a smartphone all day. In a society in which “inequality” is one of the perennial buzzwords, this instance of radical egalitarianism is pretty notable. Too bad the kids have to suffer for it.