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It used to be that a family had a single PC that was only sometimes connected to the internet, often at rather low speeds, maybe through a modem that shared the phone line with voice, and that PC (which was clunky and slow) could easily be kept in a public part of a house where it was visible to everyone what was being done on the screen, and the price of that PC meant that there would only be one in the house, and it would be shared.
Now we live in a world where kids, on their 20 minute school bus ride, are automatically surrounded by other kids whose parents have given them smart phones with unrestricted access to the internet with no adult supervision (because... school bus), and then their schools also assign them tablets to use for learning apps, class e-mail, virtual days when school is snowed out, and apps for turning in assignments at night via the camera on the tablet and wifi. And everything under the sun has a wifi connection now. The amount of devices a family has in their house that will stream youtube is surprisingly vast, if you count parents phones, and game consoles, and old recycled tablets for car trips, and... It adds up rapidly. And those devices are all super cheap, and they're all really, really hard to lock down, and they're all extremely portable. And because all their peers are always online because they've got wireless devices from sixth grade on, kids who don't have those devices really are socially excluded in an important sense.
Nothing has sat still. The technology world has absolutely rushed headlong into a totally different context than the one parents faced with the early internet.
Now, as it happens, my wife and I don't give our kids access to the default wireless network in the house, and I have a guest network on the router than I can turn on and off via browser access when class work requires it, and we currently keep the kids in public spaces in our house when they're doing internet stuff, and we've resisted getting the kids phones, although there's no way around the tablets they bring home from public school. And we have a single PC attached to our living room TV with my awesome Steam library, too, and browser access there. And my oldest is only part way through middle school. But already, we look really countercultural and, frankly, pretty controlling. It's an enormous uphill fight.
I'm not saying any of this to push any particular response, government or otherwise, to these issues. But just saying "parents should do their jobs", while true (and frustrating, I assure you), is not really recognizing how drastically things have changed, on a technology + pervasiveness level. We're just absolutely flooded in cheap wifi enabled devices that are often very difficult to lock down, especially in aggregate. And that is new.
The implicit argument that comes with the 'it's the parents' responsibility' position is that the status quo is the best we can hope for. We've had smartphones, social media, fast internet etc for years now, and we've seen what happens. Unless defenders are arguing that this is the best of all worlds given the technology that exists, then we need action beyond that taken by individual families. Whether that's smartphone bans in schools, age verification for social media and porn or whatever, if we want to move away from an anxious, depressed, isolated and screen-based childhood, then expecting every single family to unilaterally fight the flood is asking too much.
There's a reason the Amish reject technologies at a congregation-level. Doing it household by household is impossible.
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Yes, it is a difficult problem and I'm not sure if there's a solution to it. I just know that age verification won't do anything. To me, it's a coordination problem, because one household deciding to clamp down on technology use isn't going to move the needle for a whole country and everyone else is going to treat them like the Amish, so there's no good incentive for the first few hundred (maybe even few thousand) people to start increasing control over their kids that way. In an ideal society, we wouldn't have a culture of handing kids Internet-connected devices and not monitoring them one bit, but that's exactly what we do.
I still remember the early days of the Internet, when everyone was advised not to share any personal information with strangers online. Now, a lot of people and especially the younger generation do just that, and get into exactly the trouble one would expect from doing so. And now we're being told we need to share even more personal information to save the younger generation from themselves. It's all so tiresome.
If their kids are notably better off, mentally healthy, successful, healthier, and more socially active than their smart-phone counterparts, people will eventually jump.
A huge confounder is that, as many others in the thread have pointed out, a kid who doesn't have a smartphone is going to be socially othered and considered an outcast. Not just metaphorically but also literally since most of their peers are going to be communicating through smartphones. Again, it's a coordination problem.
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