What Texas's Age-Gating Law Gets Wrong About Kids and Tech

Editor note: This article has been republished from Psychology Today with the explicit permission of the author

Key points

• Age restrictions are a good idea but are difficult to enforce without privacy violations.

• Age checks and phone bans rely on compliance and are easy for kids to work around.

• Focusing on restriction instead of digital literacy deprives kids of the skills they need.

Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas recently signed legislation requiring age verification and parental consent for all app downloads by users under 18. The Texas state legislature is seriously considering further regulation to ban children from social media.

These laws are intended to protect young people from online predators, inappropriate content, and compulsive social media use. But there's a glaring omission in this approach: It does nothing to teach kids how to navigate digital spaces safely on their own.

While age restrictions sound reasonable in principle, this approach ignores a critical reality:

Kids will go online and use social media regardless. These tools are embedded in their social lives and how they interact with popular culture.

Legislation that emphasizes compliance over competence may resonate with legitimate parental fears, but it doesn't make kids any safer.

It's like arguing over the age kids can use a community swimming pool—but not bothering to teach them how to swim. We need to shift from control to competence, building self-awareness and digital literacy so kids have the skills to be smart and safe when they're online.

The Law in a Nutshell

The legislation requires:

• Age verification for all users downloading apps via the Apple or Google app stores

• Parental consent for users under 18

• Compliance across all app types, regardless of content, including innocuous apps like weather and sports

• Civil liability for app stores or developers who fail to verify age or obtain consent

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Many people don't realize this law applies specifically to app stores, not direct online access. A teen with apps already installed won't encounter new verification prompts, and it's possible to access TikTok and Instagram without an app via mobile or desktop web browsers. This gap highlights the law's fundamental limitations and underscores why digital literacy is more important than technological controls.

Supporters argue the law empowers parents and reduces kids’ exposure to online risks. Opponents include tech companies and privacy advocates, who point to significant logistical hurdles and privacy violations.

What about the kids? Both sides completely overlook the one approach that actually empowers kids to stay safe: digital literacy education.

Why the Law Won't Work

• The verification methods are problematic. Platforms could implement age verification through government ID uploads, facial recognition, credit card checks, or third-party verification services. Each approach creates serious issues. ID scans and facial recognition require collecting sensitive personal data. Credit card verification is exclusionary and outdated. Third-party services still require trusting private entities with personal information. How many data breach notifications do you get each month? Even government databases get hacked.

  
  

• Enforcement standards are unclear. What exactly counts as "reasonable" compliance? Can Apple be held liable if a clever 16-year-old uploads a borrowed ID? What happens when teens use their parents' credentials, as they've always done? This legislation opens the door to arbitrary lawsuits, profitable for law firms, but gives parents a false sense of security that someone else is doing their job for them.

  
  

• Kids will find work-arounds. Restrictive digital policies consistently underestimate young users' creativity. Teens routinely outsmart content blockers, bypass screen time limits, and create secondary accounts to evade parental controls. Age verification won't be different.

Don't be surprised when kids:

• Use VPNs and proxies to mask their location and age

• Borrow or fake IDs

• Use their parents' devices or permissions

• Shift to less regulated apps or platforms

When policies overlook developmental stages, such as teenagers' growing desire for autonomy, they backfire. The results are noncompliance, secrecy rather than safety, and driving online behaviors underground where parents aren’t around to help.

The Missing Piece: Digital Literacy

Here's what's continually missing from conversations in Texas and elsewhere: We need to educate kids to be digitally literate and responsible citizens. Research repeatedly shows that restriction alone undermines trust and delays opportunities for kids to learn responsible digital navigation (Böttger & Zierer, 2024). Legislation supporting education and digital literacy would better prepare kids for our tech-saturated future than overly simplistic policies that sound good but don't work.

Digital literacy teaches kids to recognize how apps are designed to be engaging, understand how algorithms shape what they see, and develop self-awareness about their own online behavior. These skills matter because they help kids make better decisions in real situations—whether they're dealing with cyberbullying, evaluating information credibility, or managing screen time.

Essential digital literacy includes:

• Recognizing persuasive design and manipulation, and learning why we are so susceptible to notifications and social influence

• Understanding how algorithms work invisibly to shape content

• Protecting personal information and understanding privacy and copyrights

• Self-monitoring and screen time management through awareness and goal setting

• Knowing when and how to handle conflict, like bullying, and seek help

Beyond Fear-Based Policy

The Texas law reflects a troubling trend in tech-related policy: leading with fear rather than evidence. Much like efforts to ban TikTok or restrict smartphones in schools, these actions resonate politically but are too simplistic for real impact.

Yes, kids face risks online. However, they also benefit, gaining access to learning resources, social connections, creative tools, and opportunities for civic participation. Cutting off access sends the message that kids are passive victims of technology rather than capable agents who can learn to use it well.

The “to-ban-or-not-to-ban” arguments also create the illusion that controlling tech or outlawing social media will solve the problem of declining teen mental health. Social media is only one of many factors—and not the most significant—contributing to a very complex problem. When we grasp at simple solutions, we risk diverting much-needed resources and mental health interventions that could actually help (Odgers, 2024).

What Should We Do Instead?

Rather than relying on platforms to police youth access, we need comprehensive approaches that build competence:

• For parents: Engage in open, nonjudgmental, and frequent conversations with kids about tech use to foster trust and understanding. Every household should have a technology agreement that sets limits and promotes ongoing dialogue.
  

• For schools: Urge adoption of digital literacy programs that teach critical thinking about technology and content, not just how to use it.
  

• For policymakers: Support parents with digital literacy tools and education, not just fear-driven messaging. Develop policies that recognize both benefits and risks in kids' digital lives by promoting education and reasonable, enforceable requirements.
  

• For tech companies: Provide increased transparency about age limits, algorithmic drivers, and data collection, such as age-gating and facial recognition, plus customizable controls that don't require data collection. Forget warning labels—they don't work. Fund digital literacy programs for schools.

Texas's new age verification law is well-intentioned but fundamentally flawed. It represents safety theater over substantive support; it is restriction without the education kids need to navigate digital spaces safely.

Preparation is one of the best forms of protection we can give our kids. Teaching digital literacy, encouraging ongoing parent-child conversations about technology, and promoting responsible platform design will do more to keep kids safe than any ID scan ever could. The goal shouldn't be keeping kids offline but helping them develop the skills to thrive online.

References

Böttger, T., & Zierer, K. (2024). To ban or not to ban? A rapid review on the impact of smartphone bans in schools on social well-being and academic performance. Education Sciences, 14(8), 906.

Odgers, C. L. (2024). The great rewiring: Is social media really behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness? Nature, 628(8006), 29–30.

Author:

Pamela Rutledge, Ph.D., M.B.A., is Director of the Media Psychology Research Center and faculty in the media psychology program at Fielding Graduate University where she designs and teaches courses on brand storytelling, audience engagement, and positive psychology applied to media.