Judges in two recent rulings—NetChoice v. Yost and NetChoice v. Hilgers—denigrated the utility of safety and monitoring tools that internet and technology companies provide to help parents protect minors online. Why? They found that savvy kids sometimes evade them through workarounds and lies, while parents can’t track the platforms their children use.

Accepting this “clever kids, clueless parents” mentality, which was variously embraced by Judge Eric Clay of the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Yost and Nebraska Senior US District Judge John Gerrard in Hilgers, has profound legal implications. It affects the narrow tailoring prong of the strict scrutiny test under which content-based laws restricting lawful speech are examined. Adopting a “clever kids, clueless parents” conclusion makes it easier for speech-limiting statutes to satisfy this test by waving off self-help, parental-responsibility alternatives to government-imposed decrees.

Clay and Gerrard both applied strict scrutiny to analyze the constitutionality of similar age-verification and parental-consent statutes limiting minors’ right to access and engage in First Amendment-protected speech on social media platforms. To pass strict scrutiny, a statute must do more than serve a compelling interest. It also must be tailored so narrowly—drafted so precisely—that it restricts no more speech than necessary to serve the interest. Put differently, the statute must deploy “the least restrictive means of achieving a compelling state interest” such that “[i]f a less restrictive alternative would serve the Government’s purpose, the legislature must use that alternative.”

Here’s how this rule intersects with “clever kids, clueless parents” logic: Technology companies at the internet, device, platform, and application levels already voluntarily provide parental tools and safety controls to protect and monitor minors online, as my AEI colleague Shane Tews has described and I recently noted. These tools are important on strict scrutiny’s narrow tailoring prong because they provide less restrictive alternatives for safeguarding minors as compared to government-mandated age-verification and parental-consent statutes that limit minors’ access to (and engage in) lawful speech.

The fact that some parents don’t know about or understand the tools is remedied through what the Supreme Court calls a government-run “public-information campaign.” Indeed, when considering the constitutionality of a Florida social media law last year, US District Judge Mark Walker wrote that “the appropriate response from the State is a public education campaign, either to inform parents about the risks of social media or to equip them with the knowledge they need to employ the tools they have available.” Education, not speech restriction, is the solution.

Yet, in penning the lead opinion for the Sixth Circuit’s divided Yost ruling, Clay concluded that Ohio’s verifiable parental-consent statute survived strict scrutiny’s narrow tailoring requirement. He found that educating parents about extant monitoring tools provided by technology companies isn’t an effective substitute for “[p]rospectively requiring parental consent before a [c]hild accesses a social media platform.” Clay reasoned that:

Children have at their disposal many ways of accessing the internet and can often do so anonymously, evading their parents’ supervision. Parents may not be able to keep up with what new social media platforms their children are using, in which case post hoc knowledge of available tools on a given platform is unhelpful.

In his June Hilgers opinion, Gerrard favorably cited evidence provided by Nebraska Attorney General Mike Hilgers purportedly showing that existing mechanisms for blocking social media offered by “cell phone service providers, Internet providers, and Internet browsers,” as well as the platforms’ own tools “for parents to restrict or control a minor’s use of the platform,” simply “aren’t enough. Minors can easily lie about their age and create accounts not subject to their parents’ preferred restrictions, and they can access accounts on websites banned at home at other locations.”

Adopting such defeatist views dangerously opens the door to government censorship while capitulating to the belief that clever—sometimes lying—kids who outsmart technology, when coupled with their parents’ tech naïveté, render nugatory the bevy of safety and monitoring tools and information tech companies provide. So much for incentivizing good corporate behavior. What better excuse than “clever kids, clueless parents” is there for the government to restrict minors’ access to First Amendment-protected speech and to establish blunt, one-size-fits-all restrictive default presumptions for accessing it that must be overcome and opted out of by parents? Likely none.

Educating parents—not rationing lawful speech—provides a viable path forward for mitigating (albeit not eliminating) the problem. Some kids inevitably will, as Gerrard wrote, “lie” and access accounts while away from home; others, as Clay noted, are skilled at “evading their parents’ supervision” and accessing the internet “anonymously.” Those realities aren’t tech companies’ fault—minors snuck into R-rated movies—and they don’t justify government-imposed default restrictions on minors’ First Amendment rights to access lawful content (restrictions, troublingly, that must be surmounted by parents surrendering digital identifying information).