President Trump has been "taking an interest" in how social media affects children and how foreign governments have moved to restrict minors' access to it, according to first daughter-in-law Lara Trump. She made the remarks on Miranda Devine's podcast "Pod Force One" in an episode on Wednesday.
Lara Trump, a mother of two children under the age of 10 and host of Fox News Channel's "My View," went further than merely relaying the president's curiosity. She made a personal case for age-based regulation, saying she'd welcome government action in a space where she normally opposes intervention.
And I personally would be so in favor of that. I'm not much of one for regulating things, but I would be very happy with a little bit of regulation in this space, just personally as a parent.
It was a striking admission from someone in the president's orbit, and it reflects a growing consensus on the right that Big Tech's grip on children isn't a free-market question. It's a parental one.
Lara Trump told Devine she has personally raised the issue with the president, sharing research she has reviewed on the effects of screens on developing brains. Her description was blunt:
When I talk to him about the studies that I've read and the way that a kid looks at a screen and their dopamine and their oxytocin and all these feel-good chemicals are firing, and then you take the screen away, and those all go away. Well, how are they ever going to get back to that in just regular life without a screen? They almost don't.
That's the core of the argument, and it doesn't require a policy paper to understand. Children are being neurochemically conditioned by platforms designed to maximize engagement, not well-being. The dopamine cycle she described isn't speculative. It's the business model.
She didn't sugarcoat where she thinks this leads:
It's actually frightening to consider the implications of this 10, 20, 30 years from now for these kids. I'm terrified we're going to have an entire society that's totally depressed because they can't get back to that level.
This is the argument that has quietly united parents across the political spectrum, even as the institutional left remains torn between its alliance with Silicon Valley and its stated concern for children's mental health, the New York Post reported.
Lara Trump said she and her husband, Eric, made the decision long ago to keep screens away from their kids entirely. Neither child has been given access to a phone or iPad.
They're on nothing at all. That has been something that we've established.
She described watching other families at restaurants, kids glued to screens at the dinner table, and contrasted it with her own approach:
So they bring a football with them, or they bring a coloring book with them or something, or they talk to us, so that one day when they're adults, imagine that, they're going to have the ability to converse with people instead of look at a screen.
It's a small detail, but it matters. The people closest to the president aren't theorizing about child development from a distance. They're parenting through it.
Lara Trump was candid about the limits of her insight into the president's thinking on this specific issue. "I don't know exactly where he stands," she said. "I've certainly told him where I stand on it."
What she did say is that the president is "very interested in it," framing it as a piece of a broader concern about children's health:
I think it's something that he's taking an interest in, because, look, we can do all we want to make our nutrition guidelines better, to make the food supply and public schools better, but one of the things that is going to always kind of be over us will be social media, will be screens, will be that sort of thing.
That framing is significant. It places children's social media exposure alongside food quality and school reform as threats to the next generation, not as a niche tech policy debate but as a public health priority.
The president's executive actions on social media across both terms have focused primarily on platforms' ability to censor user content. Protecting free speech on the platforms and protecting children from the platforms are two different fights, but they share a common adversary: tech companies that want maximum power with minimum accountability.
Legislative machinery already exists. Sen. Brian Schatz, a Democrat from Hawaii, introduced the Kids Off Social Media Act last year. The bill would force social media companies to keep all users under the age of 13 off their platforms. Schools receiving federal funds would also be required to block children from accessing certain social networks. The measure has cleared the committee and sits on the Senate calendar for future consideration.
Lara Trump pointed to Australia and France as models, describing regulatory bodies in those countries that have set minimum ages of 15 or 16 for social media access. The fact that conservative-friendly nations are already moving on this undercuts the reflexive libertarian objection that any regulation here is nanny-state overreach.
There's a difference between the government telling adults what they can say online and the government telling corporations they can't build addictive products for 10-year-olds. Conservatives who understand that distinction are the ones driving this conversation forward.
For years, the right's instinct on tech regulation defaulted to "let the market sort it out." But the market sorted it out in favor of algorithms that feed anxiety to teenagers for profit. The market sorted it out in favor of platforms that know their products harm minors and ship them anyway.
Parental authority is a bedrock conservative value. So is protecting children from predatory institutions. When a handful of corporations have engineered products that rewire children's brains before those children are old enough to understand what's happening, the question isn't whether government has a role. It's what took so long.
Lara Trump didn't announce a policy. She signaled a direction. And in this White House, the distance between interest and action tends to be short.
