You can get your kids off social media. It is not hard. You are their parents. You can do it.

Stop mumbling about it and just do it.

“This may be the only way to stop social media from harming our kids” declares a headline at CNN this week. The solution, according to the British writer, is an “online safety bill” currently before the British parliament, one that would “require social media companies to identify and remove content promoting self-harm, including content that glorifies suicide, and not allow children under the age of 13 to use their platforms.”

It is is, of course, intensely silly to suggest that you need an “online safety bill” to “stop social media from harming [your] kids.” You only need to get them off social media yourself. It is so easy. It literally cannot be overstated how easy it is. It’s practically simplicity itself.

It is not really becoming of a writer to go on and on about something so easy and uncomplicated. We’re expected to explicate on complex themes and complicated topics. It is assumed that we will use our skills and powers to peel back the layers of meaning and significance on profound and multi-layered issues of the day, making you look at and think about the world in new and interesting ways. This is not any of those things. This is as simple and straightforward as, “You are a parent, you can make your kid get off social media, so do it.” This is basically a traffic signal, one step up from color-coding. It’s slam-dunk stuff.

I could see this being a more difficult conundrum if social media itself had any real value and if the trade-offs were a bit more nebulous. But it’s not even that hard. Social media is terrible! It’s obviously a zero-sum game at this point, for adults and children both, but really especially for children. There is nothing a child needs on Facebook or Instagram or Twitter that he can’t get better and more comprehensively in the real world—from other people, from friends and family members, from books, from classes, from walks outside, from hobbies, from interesting TV shows. All of it is better in the real world and much worse on social media and there is no reason I can think of that a child would ever really ned to be on one of these networks, and/or why his parents would ever think it necessary that he remain on one.

So the whole idea of an “online safety bill” meant to “stop social media from harming our kids” is really just baffling. Wait, “social media” is “harming your kid?” Well, uh, get him off it, immediately. You’re telling me a useless Internet website is actively hurting your child and you’re sitting around letting it happen and waiting for the government to maybe do something about it? Why? You could do this instead: Make a rule that your child isn’t allowed on social media. There, it’s done. Cancel the accounts, block the websites on his computer, tell him he’s not allowed back on any of the sites, enforce strict consequences if he disobeys. You could solve this problem in four minutes while the British parliament takes four years to harrumph and harraw their way to some useless countermeasures.

Am I missing something here? Is there some added layer of complexity to this topic that’s deeper and more vexing than, “Your kid is using something that’s bad for him, make him stop?” Because it sure doesn’t seem that way. I think parents by-and-large have convinced themselves that they are weirdly powerless against their own children and that the only way to control them is to outsource their parenting to major authorities. But that’s simply not necessary. You don’t need Parliament to protect and defend your child, you just need to do it yourself. Get comfortable with being the authority in your child’s life and the rest will fall into place very easily. That’s it.