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This morning, over coffee and a croissant, Erin Houchin told me about her daughter.
Her biggest concern at 13 years old wasn’t a pop quiz or whether her crush liked her back. It was a stranger — or strangers — on the other side of a screen, circling closer.
That’s the childhood these kids have. That’s the world we handed them on a silver, gold, or rose-gold platter.
I am a social media influencer. I post for part of my living. My entire career is built on these platforms. And I am here to tell you, with zero ambiguity, that social media is a loaded weapon in the hands of a child, and we have spent the better part of a decade handing it to them and acting surprised when someone gets hurt.
Representative Erin Houchin (IN-9) is one of the only lawmakers in Washington actually trying to drag Big Tech and the rest of Congress into the 21st century on this catastrophe. While everyone else is riveted to AI doomsday headlines and the latest geopolitical chaos, have you checked in with your kid lately? Have you actually hung out with a teenager? These kids are a mess. Zoned out, anxious, depressed, and eerily indistinguishable from one another because they all think, talk, TikTok, and dress the same way.
The algorithm is the new parent, and it is doing a spectacularly terrible job.
Houchin can’t keep playing the lone wolf here, fighting the woke Left and Big Tech. Their reasons for keeping your 13-year-old scrolling are not benign. They are mercenary. Maybe I’m just an old-fashioned woman stuck in a 24-year-old’s body, but I say we make June “Put Down the Phone and Go Outside Month.” Celebrate touching grass. Riding bikes. Reading books. Let’s give kids a few more years of actual childhood before the algorithm owns their developing prefrontal cortex, because once you’re on social media, the psychological grip is almost impossible to break.
What Houchin is doing makes total sense, and the fact that it’s stalling is concerning.
She’s a mom of three from Indiana who has watched this wreckage up close. The current federal rule, straight out of 1998’s COPPA, sets a laughably inadequate minimum age of 13 for social media.
Thirteen. That’s when you can get on KiK and get sent messages by Graham Platner.
The legislation governing your child’s digital life predates the iPhone by nearly a decade. Houchin’s flagship RESET Act (H.R. 6488) would raise that floor to 16, force platforms to default to safer settings for minors, kill the dopamine-engineered algorithmic feeds, and give parents real, functional oversight. She introduced it in December 2025.
It’s stalled, sitting in committee.
She co-led the bipartisan Parents Over Platforms Act, which closes the loopholes that kids, including her own daughter, exploit to bypass controls. It squeaked through the subcommittee. House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Brett Guthrie (R-KY) authored the KIDS Act, which includes Houchin’s two bills — AWARE and SAFEBOTs — that require warnings on AI chatbots and protect kids from deceptive bots. It cleared the House Energy and Commerce Committee in March 2026.
Progress? Sure. But none of this is law yet. RESET hasn’t moved an inch. Congress is too busy grandstanding while kids’ brains quietly melt.
And we don’t have to speculate about the damage anymore. The CDC’s 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey shows 40% of high schoolers reporting persistent sadness or hopelessness. Twenty percent seriously considered suicide. Nine percent attempted it. Young girls are disproportionately devastated. More than three hours a day on social media doubles the risk of depression and anxiety. Suicide rates for teens exploded alongside smartphones, up over 57% from 2007 to 2017. An estimated 500,000 active predators are online daily. Forty percent of children have been approached by strangers attempting to groom them. One in seven minors has been solicited for explicit images. The victims are overwhelmingly young girls.
Where is the outrage? I thought the Left hated child predators? Or do they only care when the predator’s name is Jeffrey and selectively ignore when the predator is from below the southern border or on a platform run by Big Tech?
To be clear, no one is yanking your child’s phone out of their hand and burning it in the street. Free speech is freer than ever. Parents who decide their kid is mature enough can still grant permission. That’s the entire point of parental oversight. But the inconvenient truth is that these kids are sophisticated and sneaky little operators. They are running circles around their parents through loopholes, secondary accounts, VPNs, and borrowed devices, and hurting themselves in the process.
The law isn’t there to replace parenting. It’s there because platforms have deliberately engineered their products to circumvent it.
The ugliest dimension of this fight is that a sizable portion of the Left wants to keep that access age low precisely because they want the indoctrination pipeline wide open. Online furry spaces, LGBTABCDEFG+ echo chambers, and trans-activist corners thrive on vulnerable preteens.
Imagine if the 16-year-old, transgender, Denver, Colorado shooter was restricted in his online access during those earlier ages and wasn’t exposed to all of that hatred and indoctrination at such an early age? Maybe things would be different.
We know that algorithms push division, rage, and identity crises that turn confused kids into activists, or worse, isolated and radicalized. Social media is not neutral; it’s a culture-war supercharger creating echo chambers that breed anxiety, self-harm, and societal fractures. Some on the Left are perfectly comfortable with platforms functioning as unregulated youth indoctrination zones.
They call it inclusion. It’s not; it’s reckless exploitation with better marketing.
And to Big Tech: I genuinely wish you the best in the A.I. arms race against China. I mean it. Build great things and make America more awesome. I’m a big fan.
But your social media business model for children runs on addiction, dopamine manipulation, and harvesting data from developing brains. For children, this part is simply not a public good.
Apple, Meta, Google: build real parental controls, default them to “on,” and keep the predators and the algorithmic psychological warfare away from kids who can’t yet drive a car, sign a contract, or vote.
I vividly remember getting my iPhone 5C in fifth grade at 11 years old. This was life-changing in the best way. I could text my friends, call them, and make plans. But social media came later, so despite the phone, I still ran around outside, read actual books, had awkward face-to-face conversations with acne all over my face, and no beauty filter in sight. I experienced the profound indignity of a middle school crush who did not reciprocate. I wasn’t addicted. I was a kid. My self-worth wasn’t being quantified in likes. My sense of beauty wasn’t being calibrated against an algorithm’s highlight reel. I had the extraordinary, irreplaceable gift of boredom, and it made me interesting and interested.
We owe the next generation that same fighting chance.
Erin Houchin is in that fight. The rest of us, parents, lawmakers, social media users who know better, and yes, even the self-proclaimed “pro-children” Left, need to show up.
June is here. Be proud of your low screen time. Put the phones down. Go outside.
Your kids are waiting.
