Me too (re: privacy minded)
But…
…how can you have accountability while being anonymous?
Also, I’d push back on framing this as kids who ‘can’t behave themselves.’ We’re not talking about unsupervised screen time; there are organised groups actively targeting minors online, specifically to coerce them into self-harm and film it…That’s not a parenting gap, that’s predation. And adolescent brains aren’t fully developed in terms of risk assessment until the mid-twenties; the capacity to identify manipulation isn’t just a matter of maturity or good parenting, it’s neurology.
And ‘just watch your kids online’ is a lot easier to say than to do. Teenagers are across multiple platforms simultaneously, many of which use disappearing messages or end-to-end encryption by design. The organised groups doing the worst damage specifically operate in the private channels parents can’t see, and they work fast. You can have a perfectly attentive parent and still have a kid who gets targeted and manipulated in a single conversation before anyone notices, especially since the kid is probably more technically fluent.
Then you could argue, parents could just ban everything, the nuclear option. Which works until your kid is the only one in their class without access to the platform their school uses for homework, or the group chat everyone else is on. Social exclusion at that age isn’t trivial: it does real harm too. You can restrict, monitor, educate, and then they get exposed to it at a friends home. Kids aren’t only online at home on the family computer. The “just watch them” framing imagines a single access point that hasn’t existed for fifteen years.
You can think the proposed solutions are bad, and I agree some of them genuinely are and hate them too, without treating the underlying problem as something parents could just solve if they tried harder.