How 13 Became the Internet’s Age of Adulthood
wsj.com
wsj.com
So I created my first email address and did that. Wasn’t even a hassle, and bonus: I had an email address now. My mother didn’t even have that yet, and I don’t think she had one of her own till 2006 when I signed her up for Gmail.
Whether or not it makes sense for the age gating to be 13 or not, I couldn’t tell you, but whether it is 13 or 30, kids at whatever age we define them to be at will do as they wish one way or another. Given reality on the ground, additional legislation to try to force the reality we want is more likely to have additional costs rather than additional benefits so rather than centering our laws around age, we might want to try and center them around privacy for everyone.
Very first sentences and I can't help but think: well, if this whole "need 10 more years to make real decision and control their impulse" is true, why can they drive at 16 and vote at 18?
Look at "charged as an adult". Suddenly a 12 year old stabbing someone is mature enough to stand trial when they can't even register on a forum without parental permission. I satirically suggest that any minor tried as an adult should retain all attendant adult status for sake of consistency. Which means that any minor charged as an adult who was acquitted or had their case dismissed should be able to vote against the DA.
Understanding whether or not you should do something that could end someone's life is far simpler than understanding the potential, much less obvious risks of communicating on the internet. Also, the age limit for signing up to things on the web is as much to protect the business running the service as it is to protect children.
Whether someone is tried as an adult comes down to whether or not they could reasonably be expected to understand what they're doing is wrong, and in the case of stabbing someone that's really, really easy.
No, charging children as adults is heinously cruel.
Lack of understanding is worth considering but not a good argument for blanket treatment of children.
> At 12, you don't understand what death is, what a lifetime prison sentence entails, or even that stabbing someone might kill them.
... really?
> How can you understand what 60 years in a cell means when you've only seen 12 under your guardians' care?
Probably seems a lot worse, since a year to a 12 year old feels like at least 5 years to a 30-something. At least this 30-something and former 12-year-old. Summer alone felt about as long as two years do now.
Reminds me about the old quote about how life is like a roll of toilet paper, the more you use up the faster it goes by.
Now: feels like about two weeks between major holidays. "Wait, fireworks stands? Wasn't it just Easter?"
The stress over the Internet in particular is doubly troublesome because of the profound and abundant safety of the Internet. Compare it to literally any other way of acquiring information and you'll see it's the only one that protects the viewer from having to directly and physically interact with other people, which removes almost all danger. Of course, 'almost all' is not 'all' and some people will reject even stupendous protection if it means there remains even a single sliver of risk. Those people I think can be dismissed out of hand because they are waiting for an impossible option to be presented to them.
Also, as a side note, generally kids can legally drive at any age as long as it is done on private property and isn't so dangerous it constitutes child endangerment. If you talk to farmers you'll find many stories of kinds driving trucks on the farm when they were under 10.
Even more fun, some states don't have age limits for kids driving on public roads as long as it is farm equipment. Those laws might be one tragedy away from being rewritten, but until then it is an interesting thing to consider when discussing the relationship between legal age limits and our scientific understanding of mental maturity.
Actually, the rollback of voting age (which is a state policy with federal constraints) started in the WWII era, almost immediately after the draft age was reduced from 21 to 18 in 1942, with it almost immediately becoming a national issue and Georgia being the first state to roll back voting age to 18, in 1943, and President Eisenhower endorsing it as desirable across the nation in 1954.
The Vietnam era saw the completion of the rollback nationally.
> The argument being, if you're old enough to fight in a war [...]
No, the argument was if you are old enough to be compelled by the draft to fight in a war...
I think it makes sense to roll back driving age until autonomous driving becomes an actual option.
Some minor pols are calling for _lowering_ of the voting age, which seems out of place, although no serious pol is pushing for that.
One could argue that voting rights ought to coincide with emancipation and being self-sufficient.
1. Rolling back the voting age only for women.
2. Dismantling Secret Service and forbidding drafts by constitutional amendment.
3. Requiring women to register for Selective Service.
4. Rolling back the voting age for everyone with a voluntary Selective Service, and then granting voting rights for anyone male or female signed up for Selective Service or active military service.
Grant voting rights to enlistees who entered early as well (those with parental/guardian consent), if we think about it logically. Even if in this case it’s voluntary because it’s obvious they’re willing to take the call of duty whatever that is and that contributes to our society’s continuity.
Historically those with the vote have often pretended that they vote wisely and newcomers could not be depended upon to do likewise. There is no evidence for this proposition, Trump appealed perfectly well to retirees, to men, to those who owned country estates, and only lost marginally among the well-educated. If there is wisdom, it's not the domain of the existing electorate.
As to why it shouldn't coincide with emancipation, government policy doesn't wait until you're emancipated, everything from whether the air you breathe is toxic to whether you have to do gym class is a matter of government policy, why not give those affected a say?
Until you are emancipated, one is essentially selfish (taking in, rather than being contributory and adding value). I.e. you don’t have as much skin in the game.
You don’t have to have property to contribute, you don’t have to be a man to contribute. It’s clear those aspects were anachronistic and failed to reflect reality.
At the same time a 25 year old who has no desire to move out from a parents or guardians home has less argument to a right to vote than a 16 year old who’s pulling a job, going to school and helping siblings financially or otherwise.
Vote? How about be drafted into the army, carry a gun into battle, and be responsible for all that entails. I have no time for people who claim 18yos don't have properly developed brains. They are young. They are often stupid. They are not ill or mentally defective.
I was just reading an article about the "role model" parents associated with youth baseball. It is clear that age is no predictor of decorum or intelligence.
https://mentalhealthdaily.com/2015/02/18/at-what-age-is-the-...
Because it's needed in most places in order to be a functional adult and giving late teenagers the legal means to have useful personal mobility is beneficial to society. States used to allow kids to drive at like 12 and 14 and it really wasn't that big a deal since most of them didn't anyway. It's not like a 12yo needs to drive to work. It's not like most parents would trust their 12yo with a car anyway.
>and vote at 18?
Because that's the age for the draft and if you're old enough to be drafted (very different from volunteering) then you should have some say in the politicians who are starting the war.
Unrelated to these two points, being a functioning adult (or at least enough of one to drive and vote responsibly) has much more to do with having experience trying to be a functional adult and experiencing the consequences if/when you fail at it than it does with whether you're 16 or 21. Obviously the 16yos are gonna have a slightly worse time of it but a normal 16yo is basically the same as a dumb 21yo and we let dumb 21yos do everything.
If it were up to me you'd get all the normal adult stuff (drink, smoke, open a bank account with only your name on it, etc.) by 16/17 and then vote at 25 because the people who run government have such an outsize impact on society in the long term that you should probably have some adulting experience before you get to have a say in that kind of thing.
It depends. Some things have different consequences than others, and it makes sense to phase them in.
If you list them by age, it probably makes more sense. For example, in Germany, assumption of liability is gradual, with criminal liability starting later:
- 7 years: limited liability starts (court gets to figure out if the kid could have understood the consequences of their action in each case). traffic related cases remain exempt.
- 10: limited liability in traffic starts
- 14: limited criminal liability starts (juvenile penal code applies)
- 16: limited drinking (beer, wine, no spirits), assumption of sexual self-determination, driving certain vehicles (motorized bicycles), voting at the county level, marriage possible under certain circumstances
- 18: treated like an adult: vote, drive, drink, have full legal/criminal liability, except that it can be reduced to juvenile level if a court determines that your development lags behind
- 21: end of fall back to juvenile penal code
The main issue in the US seems to be that every state and county has its own rules that add to the complexity, but for any single location I don't think it will be much more complex than the above.
Mobile service, good question - I have no kids of my own and back then there was no mobile, but I suppose it's the same: contract is signed by a parent, but in child's name. (we have very sensible pre-paid offers, so there's no financial risk)
The trend over the last couple decades has been to restrict under 18 driving, so there's that.
18 year olds have even passed selection for the SAS.
Driving: in this case, there's a big cost/benefit balance. On one hand, unleashing 16yo drivers on to the roads is scary AF. On the other, what chaos would ensue if you generally tried to tell teenagers they couldn't go anywhere? You can debate the exact age cutoff, but it's a less-of-two evils calculation.
Voting: for various reasons we want to send 18yo kids to fight wars and apparently (in the US at least) our collective sense of fairness, as rudimentary as it is, lead us to at least give them a minor say in the matter. Look up the history of changing the voting age from 21 to 18 in the US. Perhaps it really did help, because we haven't used the draft since a few years after the change.
Perhaps the above would depend on the text of the bill, ie. existing 13-15 year olds can continue to use the services without interruption. That would be up to the lawmakers.
And, as per the article, lying about the child's age is a norm to get them on the internet as early as 10 or 11. I have a few friends who were fine telling their children to lie about their age to get them on instagram and snapchat. As a service there's not much you can do about this unless you require every sign-up to go through the COPPA parent verification process (where the most popular method is credit card verification), so COPPA being changed to "you can be penalized if they're under 13 even if they say they're over that age" wouldn't be a solution.
0: https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/14/after-year-long-lockout-tw...
And remembering my childhood self, there is nothing that would have stopped me from getting one.
Being a parent now myself also in fact would probably even assist my kids to get whatever accounts they want...better to have it happen under my supervision than in secret.
As always, lawmakers are a little out of touch with reality
Also, there’s nothing banning Facebook from offering under-13 children accounts, other than their own lack of options for offering non-tracking/non-advertised accounts for those children.
LOL, that's the future of privacy, setting your age to below 13.
(This is a joke, I am Jewish).