That's a very good question. First of all, in conjunction with what Lianna McDonald just said, when we talk about the youth of children and their extreme access to technology, one of the things that needs to be provided is guidance to parents with respect to time and media. Most physicians today don't have enough time to talk about that when they are doing anticipatory guidance with families. Having children accessing media for excessive amounts of time every day makes it the most normal method of communication for those children and also the most common method of learning.
We need to help parents recognize that putting children on autopilot with media is not a good thing and that they, in fact, have to be very protective of their children. Many times they are extraordinarily excited because the child shows a lot of skill in technology, maybe more than the parent, in fact, with various types of technology. However, if the parent doesn't know how to manage, control, and filter content for their children, I frequently say in national arenas, “Do not purchase this kind of technology unless you know how to use this”.
In one of my congressional testimonies in the United States, one of the things that I recommended was that all public libraries in the country should have dedicated librarians to help parents understand the different technologies as they become available, because most parents do not know how to protect their children in that particular arena.
From the perspective of age verification, I believe that it is very important for us to try to seek to follow the path of the U.K. that Dr. Dines was speaking of and put in place some means of not allowing very young children into content that is apparently covered by freedom of speech statutes, etc. Age verification is very important, and right now, it is not at all being promoted in cyberspace.