This is not about telling kids no. This is about companies (and foreign hostile governments!) worth billions of dollars openly studying how best to prey on children's minds. There are things that are just poisonous to society as a concept.

The same people demanding the anti-smart phone laws will rat your ass out the second your kid is spotted walking alone, playing independently, etc. They want to put you in a catch-22 situation.

The real problem here is way less people are parents or people that have no idea what parenting is like, so they don't understand the practicalities of raising children so they come up with the dumbest laws possible and then lord it over you with the full weigh of the state so they can pretend to be parents but with none of the responsibility and all of the smug moral superiority.