The nationalisation of parenthood
The Government has launched a major new consultation on banning social media for under-16s.
This comes as Ofcom and international regulators join forces to accelerate ‘age assurance’ systems that depend on defining what is ‘harmful’ for children.
Child safety matters. Parents are rightly alarmed by what the internet is doing to their children. We see the anxiety, the addiction, and the exposure to pornography. We see the terrifying rise of gender ideology, with confused teenagers being nudged towards medicalisation by algorithmic feeds that push LGBT indoctrination.
But we must look closer. A social media ban requires enforcement, and enforcement requires identity and content classification. Under the guise of ‘child safety’, the Government is assembling a mechanism that risks shifting parental authority from the home to a compliance state.
That matters because marriage is the institution that makes parental authority durable: two adults, bound, united, accountable.
The first warning sign is the threat to your wallet. When then Technology Secretary Peter Kyle was pressed on enforcement and penalties for the new age-verification checks, he refused to give a clear assurance that families would not be penalised. “Everything,” he said, “is on the table”.
This opens the door to a ‘Parent Tax’. Big Tech profits from addictive design and ideological capture, yet the Government leaves open the possibility of penalties landing on families who fail to police it perfectly.
The second threat is to your beliefs. The justification for these new powers is to protect children from ‘harm’. But in 2026, ‘harm’ is a politicised category.
To the modern progressive bureaucrat, ‘harm’ increasingly includes any view that contradicts the new state religion of identity politics. If regulators are given the power to filter ‘harmful’ speech, pro-marriage views could easily be censored while LGBT indoctrination is protected as ‘inclusive’.
This is not a remote risk. Take the case of Ben Dybowski, a teaching assistant in Cardiff. He was escorted off the premises after expressing standard Christian beliefs, including the view that marriage is between a man and a woman, during a private, staff-only forum. The school’s reaction was telling: a letter was sent to parents stating that he was removed for “possible safeguarding issues”.
If schools treat belief in real marriage as a safeguarding threat, the incentives are already in place for online regulators to do the same.
At C4M, we know why we are in this position. The State is attempting to fill a vacuum created by the systematic undermining of real marriage.
Decades of policy have treated fathers as optional. The result is a crisis of authority in the home. Now, the Government proposes itself as the ‘Digital Father’ – cold, bureaucratic, and hostile to our values.
C4M does not simply oppose its plans; we demand a better way. We call on the Government to:
- Guarantee no fines for parents: In Australia, the government has explicitly ruled out penalties for families, placing the onus entirely on the tech giants. The UK must do the same.
- Explicitly protect pro-marriage speech: We demand a guarantee that lawful pro-marriage speech is protected in any “harm” definitions and platform guidance.
- Empower parents, don’t replace them: We need strict liability for platforms that push addictive content and privacy-preserving age-gates at the source.
We all want our children to be safe, but the strongest safeguard is still a committed, married, mother and father.