Instagram head Adam Mosseri recently sat for a two-plus hour grilling with members of the Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security. As I read about his testimony before Congress, I couldn’t help but grieve for today’s adolescents. Growing up is hard enough. Growing up in the warped world of social media is a nightmare.

And no one has the guts to protect them from it. Not big tech, which is motivated by profit to prey upon us all, and not even parents.

My children are young adults now, and if I could get a do-over on parenting, I would keep electronic devices-even offline-out of their hands until much later. I would also forbid social media apps until senior high school, at least. A decade ago, no one fully understood the adverse mental health risks of constant exposure to the digital world.

Now we are without excuse.

From the leaking of internal research at Facebook to the latest charges against Instagram-we now know that social media use is brutal on kids’ self-esteem and often gives rise to depression and anxiety. What’s more, the tech companies know it. They offer half-baked, weak “solutions” when called to account, but they will never willingly give up the algorithm-driven manipulation and ownership of the American mind and the cash cow it represents.

Yet we skip down to the local cell phone store and buy our children smartphones in middle school as if we’re doing them a favour. The usual rationalisation is that we need to communicate with them as they gain more independence. But where is it written that your child needs an Internet-capable computer more potent than what sent the Apollo missions into space in their pockets all day, every day?

All our kids need is a way to let someone know that soccer practice ended early and they need a ride. You leave the store with a device that supplies that plus 1000 things they don’t need. And once a device with all that app capability is in their hands, they campaign day and night to download all the same social media apps their friends have.

Soon enough, even well-intentioned parents wear down. The day you bought the smartphone, you set yourself up to lose. You set your kids up to lose.

I’m glad that members of Congress are holding big tech’s feet to the fire. But all these harsh exchanges in committee hearings don’t amount to a hill of beans if not followed by initiatives that create real consequences for their lack of transparency and abuse of America’s kids for profit.

But let’s be brutally honest: Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube can’t get to your kid without your help. When we buy our children these devices, we send them out into the digital world to experience things we would never allow them to see in real life.

TikTok will show your kid various types of videos on the For You page, some of which will be women dancing suggestively. If your 11-year-old son watches a couple of those or even lingers over them for a second or two, the algorithm will feed him more of that. Why don’t you just drop him off at a strip joint after school? Cut out the middle man.

If your daughter looks at thousands of filtered, photoshopped, and downright fake images of other women and girls, her brain will eventually be unable to understand that she looks just fine as a real human being. Why don’t you sit her down every night and tell her she’s ugly for three hours? It’s the same thing.

We send our kids into a pack of wolves with a steak tied around their necks when we hand them a fully-capable smartphone. It’s technology they don’t need, with a million downsides. So sure, be angry with big tech when you see the latest smug CEO promising to do a little bit of nothing while people genuinely suffer. But don’t be more furious with the CEO than you are with yourself.

It’s his job to make money for his shareholders. It’s your job to protect your kids. You do your job, and it will matter less if he does his job ethically.

 - TNS