This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, June 21st,

2023. I'm Caleb Brown. There are several ways for parents to protect

their kids from nefarious influence or data collection online that have

the added benefit that government needn't be involved in any way.

Cato's Jennifer Huddleston is author of a new paper on the subject we spoke yesterday.

Forgive me, Jennifer, and I implore the forgiveness of my audience.

I have very little tolerance for parents who lazily place the burdens of parenthood onto the government.

I dislike it greatly and it seems that entrepreneurial politicians are more than happy to take up this immense burden of trying

to design policy where a basic level of sufficient parenting would do and protecting young people online

definitely falls at least in my view squarely within the category of things that parents ought to do that politicians at least are more than happy to attempt to craft policy to deal with.

Tell me before we get started you have a new out, but before we get to sort of the substance

of what a basically adequate parent can do to protect their children online.

What is so bad about having the government at least

attempt to craft policies to engage

in this kind of protection of young people?

Given various headlines, we're seeing many parents and policy makers express concerns about the relationship

between kids and teens and various technologies, particularly social media.

But these concerns and their solutions are not a one-size-fits-all situation.

Like you mentioned, as a a result parents are often going to be in the best

spot to make these decisions and what we've seen with many of the policies proposed so

far is that they'd be incredibly restrictive, that they would really place severe

limitations on free speech, on privacy for all users, not just for young people or parents,

...