What Canada Should Learn From Australia’s Under-16 Social Media Ban
Australia is about to run a bold social experiment: a national social media ban for anyone under 16. It’s the kind of policy that sounds clean and decisive in a government announcement and instantly chaotic the moment it meets real families, real teenagers, and real technology.
For the record, I’m not opposed to a world with far less social media. If someone pulled the plug tomorrow, I don’t think civilization would crumble. In fact, it might improve. But this specific approach raises a pile of questions that no one seems ready for.
Parents Did Stuff Before AI: A Reminder That We Weren’t Always Helpless
There’s a strange narrative floating around these days that modern parents would crumble without AI, apps, or a device telling them what to do next. It’s as if daily life used to be impossible before we could fire off a prompt like “make me a meal plan that doesn’t involve cilantro.”
The truth is both simpler and funnier: parents used to do absolutely everything without any of this technology. Life wasn’t smoother, but it still worked. Kids got raised, jobs got found, dinners got made, and somehow everyone survived using tools like paper, memory, and pure improvisation.
Can you tell I am getting close to being an old man on the porch?? (Please don’t look at the photo on my homepage)
Tech helps. AI is handy. But parents were never helpless. Here’s a look back at how things actually got done before ChatGPT, before smartphones, and even before the internet.