As a parent of three wild boys, I’m very used to stopping them from indulging in their wildest fantasies. No, you can’t surf down the stairs. No, we can’t take every pillow off the couch, stack them outside, and jump off the roof. No, we can’t drive 100 mph through our neighborhood now or ever. This is just part of my daily parenting ritual: save my boys from their lesser, more impulsive selves. As they’re still young, the impulsivity and desire to do crazy things still exist in the realm of dangerous or ridiculous actions, but I’m fully aware that as they get into their teen years, their desires and risks will be around the opposite gender, not the couch pillows. This is where social media turns many, many boys into predators.

When I was in high school, I loved girls. I remember being completely intoxicated by their, well, everything. That’s just what it was like being a teen boy, and if I wanted to even get to the point where a girl wanted to hold my hand, I had to make myself worthy in her eyes. I had to dress well enough (not well, to be clear, just well enough), I had to be smart enough, athletic enough, and just generally be someone girls kind of liked. If I wanted anything more from a girl, that involved very classic relationships and commitments and behavior. Being a predator was never an option. Tricking a girl was never a thought. Manipulating people or blackmailing them was impossible in my mind, because, you know, who would do that? Well, it turns out, plenty of young people do if given the option.

What we’re seeing today is that the structure of the world and information with social media and phones is such that the barriers to young men’s lesser selves have been removed. One extremely common scam if you’re a young man and would like to see a young woman without clothes on is to connect with her anonymously via social media apps like SnapChat, tell her that you already have nude photos of her, and tell her that if she doesn’t send you another, different nude photo, you’ll share this one with everyone she knows. This scam works amazingly, primarily because the odds of someone having a nude photos of the average 17 year old highschool girl is actually quite high, but if you think about what just happened, you realize that the young man is 100% a predator. Blackmailing someone for an underage nude photo of themselves is unbelievably illegal, but young men do it all the time because they can thanks to their phones. They know it’s wrong, which is why these things are done with anonymous or burner accounts. They know it’s wrong because they’ll tell you, the parent, that they’d never do that. And they know it’s wrong because they’re aware that if the girl in question wanted to be seen with her clothes off, she would have absolutely let the young man know, but she didn’t. Why is this happening? Because they all have phones and social media.

I try to keep my boys from burning the house down pretty much every afternoon, but as they get older, I’m going to have to keep them from burning their lives down. It is not a popular position to take, but removing tech from kids until you absolutely have to give it to them is part of making sure my boys don’t become tech sociopaths. I don’t want them to have the option to anonymously blackmail young women. I don’t want them to have to contemplate these types of actions. I want to give them as much time to develop their frontal cortex because being presented with the worst social tool humanity has ever made. We, as parents, have a clear choice to make. Do we make the unpopular choice and restrict tech, or do we make our kids predators? This is what we should be asking.