"with nine out of 10 parents saying they are in favour of a ban in response to a government consultation"

I wonder why those 90% of parents don't cut their children off from social media right now.

They have the power to do it.

I suspect they don't really; once you give a teen a smartphone your control over what websites they visit ends.

(you will reply "don't do that then")

But also: cutting one kid off from social networks ostracises them. The parents recognize it's a collective action problem.

Network effects from the other side:

If one parent forbids their child then their child becomes a pariah. If no child is able to access social media then they will all interact without it. So yeah, a parent needs their peer's children to also not use social media so that their child is not left out.

In general I'm against age based bans. I think there are alternatives where we would identify and just generally regulate the harmful features of social media. In the meanwhile, I feel empathetic towards the difficulties of parenting in this era.

Yeah, this I will seriously never understand. When I was a kid, if my mother didn't want me doing something then she would make sure I couldn't do it. Is nobody parenting their children anymore? Do they just let them do whatever they want these days? I've got a 2 year old of my own and can't imagine just handing him an iPad and ignoring him all day like I see other parents do. I can't tell if it's laziness, or ignorance, or some combination of the two.

There are more angles on this, not exactly easy. The easiest way to make a kid to do something, is to forbid that very thing.

If you are the one cutting it off, while your kid's whole school is very much up to date with latest brainrot content, then you still lose.

Your kid is the outcast, while it will be exposed to it anyway, through peers. Meanwhile you are the bad one, making it much harder to have an actual conversation on the topic.

I am vividly interested in this, as my kid is growing up. I hear how a bit older kids play and what they talk about on the playground and feel that I have very little time left to react (kid is still just now starting to show interest in phones and such). A ban on all social media for kids would make this so much easier.

denying smartphone basically makes your kid an outcast, which might be fine for some kids, not fine for others, but ignoring that, the school basically requires smartphones, even uses apps to open the lockers, or to communicate about group projects.

apple's parental controls are total joke, per app blocks are not good at all, what you want is content type blocks, which of course is impossible.

example: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254480754?sortBy=rank

You fail to understand just how good kids are at getting around restrictions. This despite having been a kid yourself who would have found ways around it.

Often we don't really have the power we want either. It is easy to say ban everything. However realistically that isn't the correct answer, too much school work really is on devices - often provided by the school so I can't lock them (except for the limited controls the school gives to us - if the correct app works on our devices that then we are expected to have). Every week some new hole in their block app gets spread around school - until the school figures it out and blocks it all the kids have it.

The only think unique about the above is devices. I guarantee if you go back 3000 years in history you will find parents complaining about their kids in similar ways.

That's like arguing against bans on alcohol and cigarette sales to minors because parents "have the power" to ban it for their kids themselves. There is a role for the state to help parents socialize their children properly.

This statistic comes from here -- https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/parental-support-... -- a preliminary analysis of the consultation. The headline statement is:

    "Of the parents and carers of children aged 21 and under who responded to Question 12 on the full-length version of the consultation, 89% supported “a legal requirement for social media services to have a minimum age of access”." 

    Caveats and limitations

    Users should note the following when interpreting these results: 
    Self-selecting sample

    The consultation was open to anyone who chose to respond. The results reflect the views of parents and carers who were motivated to take part, and are not representative of parents and carers nationally. As with any open public consultation, respondents may differ systematically from the wider population in their views and characteristics. 
    Question routing

    These questions were only presented to respondents who wanted to respond to Chapter 2: Interventions for safer, more positive experiences. All questions in this section were optional. Finally, Question 13 was only presented to respondents who answered “Yes” to Question 12 (i.e. those who supported a legal requirement for a minimum age of access in principle). The 96% figure therefore relates to the level of agreement with a minimum age of at least 16 among those parents and carers who opted to respond to this Chapter and already supported some form of minimum age requirement. It does not represent the views of all consultation respondents, nor all parents and carers who responded.
    Full consultation only

    The figures relate only to the full-length version of the consultation, not the streamlined parents’ and children’s consultations.

   These figures should be treated as provisional. A comprehensive analysis of all consultation responses will be published separately.consultation, respondents may differ systematically from the wider population in their views and characteristic

The representative study isn't published yet. The provisional headline 90% number is.

[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/educatio...

That does not mean that these parents understand the technical aspects of it.

e.g. How effective it will be: less than they might think, software is not infallible magic

What the side effects might be - more than they might think - excluding the underage means verifying the age of everyone.

So articles like this aim to raise awareness, all of this is clearly spelled out in the article.

> They have the power to do it.

Do they? It seems like schools are pushing tech and "ed-tech" in schools pretty hard while being typically incompetent at actually controlling how students use it[1].

Some choice exerpts:

> Lisa Sunbury is a professor of early childhood education in Santa Cruz, California, and she had a child at Mission Hill Middle School. Her 7th grade daughter has a set of serious issues that require an IEP. Lisa did her part at home, enforcing the low-screen policy. One element of this plan was supposed to be minimal access to school devices and a clear requirement that the device be inaccessible outside of certain classes. This was all on doctor’s orders.

> Yet, Sunbury would regularly find her daughter awake at 3am, playing video games on the school Chromebook that she wasn’t supposed to have. She discovered a prohibited TikTok account, made on the school device, with dance videos posted from gym class using that same device.

> Beverly Hyde, a parent in Concord, North Carolina, was explicitly told that if her son wasn’t going to use his Chromebook, “he will just sit alone and spend the day doing nothing.”

> And this was no empty threat. Linda in Texas discovered that while her doctor-ordered opt-out request for her 2nd grader was technically being honored, the school wasn’t providing any alternative instruction. They were just “having her sit and draw while the other kids were online.”

[1] https://www.persuasion.community/p/inside-the-anti-tech-rebe...

Most parents probably don't think, and just say an automatic yes when it comes to governmental restrictions. I am not sure why that is so - they are probably happy with their assumptions about how the world works, so they are fine with governments being restrictive in general.

Has been discussed here again and again.

Apparently parenting "its too hard", you "dont know how hard it is", and the alternative of "not having kids" is somehow impractical.