Except they are. I’m not aware of any actual bypasses of parental controls on iOS or android. You choose apps and allow or deny them, and you provide limits which are guarded by passcodes or parental prompt (on iOS at least).

> It feels like we're running out of time.

I mean, does it? It feels like we’re running guns blazing into something that will be trivially bypassable (hello free VPN to some random European country - remember Hola?).

I think the idea is that while individuals will absolutely find ways round it, it should help to reduce the network effect of everyone a kid knows being already on it. How true that is remains to be seen.

One campaign I’ve liked is one in the UK to try and get the parents of whole year groups in school to agree to not buy phones until their children are a certain age. This removes a lot of the peer pressure of ‘my friends all have one’.

Regulation does add friction. And it makes it easier for a parent to say 'no, you aren't allowed that app' (which you can obviously say anyway, but it gives you a very solid and non-negotiable reason to say no). Some children will find their ways round things, but a lot, if their friends aren't using a particular app, won't bother, or they will be the type of children who won't try and break the law.

Most apps and sites are terrible in terms of the parental controls they provide - they tend to be all or nothing. E.g. I'd like to have a group for our family on WhatsApp but I don't want my children to be able to join random WhatsApp groups and there isn't any way to have the former and not the latter.

Homework requires internet-connected devices (I guess you can semi-supervise that, but it becomes harder as they become older as you don't want to sit there watching them do all their homework).

There is also a cost socially, which is hard to navigate as a parent. If everybody is talking about minecraft every break and playing it together in the evenings, then it's hard for them if they haven't even seen the game.

yeah, but lot's of bad parents exist. Which is why there are laws around kids having to be in school, etc.

Maybe fine the parents if the kids get caught. Teaches them to teach their children better.

The problem is everyone else’s kids is on social media. As a teenager I never had a Facebook account, but every other kid did and every event was organised and invites sent on Facebook.

It could have been done over sms, email, or any other private messaging, but because everyone was on Facebook, if you weren’t too, you weren’t invited.

Almost all parents I know just let their kids use their phones. It's wild.

I mean, the government bans lots of things for under 18s. Gambling, alcohol, opening bank accounts, getting married are all restricted by governments. I’m not saying governments shouldn’t provide laws on what children can and can’t do, I’m saying that this law is a poor way of doing it.