Give parents the power to protect their kids online

By MICHELLE WALLPE
Guest Columnist

I grew up on a crop and cattle farm in rural Indiana. I went to school at Purdue. I built my career here as a landscape designer, model, life coach and urban planner. I also had the privilege of teaching children at Carmel High School. I loved being an educator, but one of the hardest lessons I learned was that sometimes we don’t know what our children are encountering online until something has gone wrong.

I remember students coming to me with concerns about interactions they were having on Roblox. They told me about people approaching them through online chats and interactions on the platform. I took those concerns seriously. I brought them to the school administration. They said they couldn’t force or enforce parents to take action to protect their kids. I suggested that at least an announcement to parents be made and maybe a list of parental apps parents could use to monitor and or prevent their children from using games like Roblox.

And then, I was left with a question that has stayed with me: What happens when the adults who should be able to protect a child don’t even know what that child has been exposed to?

The answer cannot simply be to tell parents to monitor everything their children do online. Parents already have an enormous responsibility. We can set rules, have conversations, check devices, and teach our children about online safety. But we shouldn’t have to discover every app, every platform, and every potential danger one at a time, often after our children have already encountered something they shouldn’t have.

That is why I support efforts like the App Store Accountability Act. This legislation takes a fundamentally different approach to protecting children online. Instead of putting the entire burden on parents to police dozens of individual apps and platforms, it creates a parental-consent checkpoint at the app-store level.

Under this legislation, app stores would verify a user’s age and, when the user is a minor, obtain verifiable parental consent before that child can download an app or make an in-app purchase.

It could be the difference between finding out after the fact that your child has been communicating with strangers through an app, versus receiving a notification before the app ever reaches your child’s device.

One approach asks parents to clean up a problem. The other gives parents an opportunity to prevent it.

As a former teacher, I know how important it is for parents and schools to work together. But schools cannot be expected to serve as the primary safety net for every child’s online life. And teachers cannot possibly know every app a child is using, every account they have created or every person contacting them through those platforms. Parents need to be brought into the process from the beginning.

I also appreciate the work Congresswoman Erin Houchin is doing to make online safety a priority and taking seriously the concerns families are raising about children’s digital lives. In addition to cosponsoring the App Store Accountability Act, Houchin has also worked on other legislation addressing children’s online safety, including proposals dealing with parental consent and social-media access.

That work is important. But I believe we should be thoughtful about how we protect children. Parents, not the government, not schools, and certainly not technology companies, should ultimately be able to decide what is appropriate for their own children. Families have different values, different circumstances, and different children.

Let’s give parents the information and authority they need before the download, rather than asking them to intervene after the damage has been done.

The App Store Accountability Act puts parents firmly in charge because protecting our children starts with empowering the people who know them best.