By MELANIE A. LEWIS
Albuquerque Community School Coordinator
As a Community School Coordinator in Albuquerque, I spend my days nurturing connections between families, schools, and our community. My passion is creating enriched learning environments where students can discover their potential and where parents can be active participants in their children’s education. Part of this work involves navigating the increasingly complex digital landscape that our children inhabit.
The reality facing New Mexico’s children today is daunting. They navigate social media platforms designed to capture and retain their attention, often without adequate safeguards in place. While social media can offer benefits—connecting with peers, accessing educational resources, and exploring interests—the risks are significant when young users engage without proper supervision.
I’ve seen the toll that unchecked social media use can take: anxiety, depression, cyberbullying, sleep deprivation, and unhealthy comparisons with peers. I’ve witnessed parents struggling to monitor their children’s online activities across multiple platforms, each with different settings and policies.
Recently, New Mexico lawmakers considered HB 313, a bill that would have required app store-level parental approval for social media accounts. This approach offered a practical, streamlined solution that put parents in control while protecting children’s privacy. Unfortunately, the legislative session ended without the bill’s passage.
Although New Mexico must continue exploring ways to address these challenges, we cannot afford to wait. The need for action remains urgent, and in the absence of state-level protections, it is time for the federal government to step up. A federal law requiring app store-level parental approval would provide much-needed consistency across all states and ensure that parents have the tools to help their children navigate social media safely. Last Congress, federal lawmakers introduced the App Store Accountability Act, which included provisions to require app stores to verify parental consent before allowing minors to create social media accounts. Reviving and advancing this legislation would be a crucial step toward protecting children online.
Under such a system, when a teen attempts to download a social media app, the app store would notify their parent or guardian, similar to how parents are alerted about potential purchases. Parents could then decide whether to authorize the download. Most importantly, this verification would happen just once at the app store level, rather than repeatedly across dozens of individual platforms. This approach offers several advantages over the patchwork of current regulations.
First, it respects privacy. By validating a teen’s age through the app store, individual apps wouldn’t need to collect sensitive personal information. This limits the risk of data breaches that could expose children’s information. Second, it creates consistency. Rather than navigating different verification systems across platforms, families would have one centralized place to manage permissions. Third, it acknowledges the reality that social media is here to stay and empowers parents to make informed decisions about their children’s participation.
Some have raised concerns that parental approval requirements might cut off vulnerable teens, particularly LGBTQ+ youth, from supportive online communities. This is a real concern. However, app store verification would not give parents access to monitor their teen’s accounts or communications—it would simply allow them to approve which platforms their teen can access, not how they use them.
New Mexico’s legislative session may have ended without action on this issue, but the need for protections has not disappeared. As we continue working to create a safer digital environment for young people, federal lawmakers must take the lead in implementing common-sense solutions like app store-level parental approval. Reviving federal legislation like the App Store Accountability Act would be a meaningful step in the right direction. Our children’s well-being depends on it.