“You can’t ever take your eyes off them.” That's what parents tell would-be parents about parenting: it’s constant.
Which is arguably what makes parenting so fulfilling: the work. Fulfillment and joy are a mirror into the endless effort and frequent exhaustion that parenting implies.
The deep meaning of parenting comes to mind as South Carolina legislators consider HB 4591, the Stop Harm From Addictive Social Media Act. Among other things, the bill would require that social media platforms verify age of users, it would prohibit allegedly "addictive design elements like auto-play and infinite scroll" on social media, plus it would prohibit advertising that targets young people. Allowing for the rather high odds that tech savvy youth could work around age verification as they have for decades, along with limits on usage, the real problem with the legislation goes deeper: it creates a wedge between parents and their kids.
Which means the Stop Harm From Addictive Social Media Act overlooks a crucial truth: legislation meant to aid parents in the parenting function robs children of the constancy of parenting, and frequently exhaustive parenting, that imbues the latter with meaning and success. Put another way, there are no shortcuts with something as important as raising young people. By extension, there are no laws that can make easy what is given powerful meaning by the simple, crucial truth that it’s difficult.
No doubt HB 4591's sponsors bring good intentions to their aim to make the job of parenting easier, but laws can’t do that. And they wouldn’t make parenting simpler as is.
Parents need to be involved as kids utilize social media, and in being involved they need to set rules at times no matter how challenging doing so can be. The worth inherent in actively overseeing what their children do can be found in the challenge of doing so, which is why it’s important that an essential act of parenting not be legislated away.
Deep involement that includes setting individual boundaries for social media use is what parents need to be a part of on the path to conveying essential information to their children about how much they’re cared for, but also about their own individual values. Government cannot be the substitute for parents, yet that’s exactly what’s implied by HB 4591.
Worse, the unwitting, surely well-intentioned substituting of the law for routine, hands-on parenting implies problems bigger than that which erects a wedge between parents and their children. To see why, it must be remembered that life happens on the margin.
What this happily means is that laws meant to help parents or none, a high percentage of parents will not have what they do in painstaking fashion altered in any way by legislation proposed to reduce any perceived parental burden. In other words, most of us “don’t need a law” to be endlessly vigilant parents.
Which presents another problem with HB 4591, and specifically legislative efforts to help parents help their kids use social media without harm. No doubt some parents will take legislators up on their Faustian offer to make their job easier. What a mistake if so.
It recalls the quote that begins this opinion piece: “You can’t ever take your eyes off them” is but a euphemism for the undeniable truth that parenting never stops, and certainly can’t be given a break here and there by seemingly benevolent legislators. Yet on the margin some parents will allow government to legislate away their responsibilities, and with at times tragic results: while endless legislation can be written with an eye on making social media safe by law, what's on the books won’t necessarily keep kids from doing what they’ve been told not to do.
Which is the point. It’s in the constancy of parenting that the best results are achieved not via helicoptering, but in the knowledge young people have that they’re very much being looked after. Let’s not legislate away the need for muscular parenting, not to mention what provides young people with so much security as a consequence.
