> That’s not to advocate for unfiltered internet access or anything, just presenting my experience as a data point and food for thought.

This 'food for thought' stands to mental health as McDonalds stands to physical health. You're trying to make the case that limiting teenager access to controlled substances is 'creating a controlled environment of which the person only will become aware when he leaves home'. This is, to put it bluntly, abject nonsense. My 14yo daughter - the 20yo does her own things by now but has managed to evade being caught by the machine, most likely in no small part thanks to her upbringing - knows perfectly well that her access to these 'services' are being limited, she knows why, she knows what the 'services' have to offer having seen her friends and others around her drown in them. She is in no way living in some bubble which she'll only recognise and escape once she leaves home.

Stop apologising for inaction in the face of the 'social' disease, this is like that well-known cartoon of the dog sitting in a burning room while he says 'this is all fine' or something along those lines. Things are not all fine and it is up to parents like us to find a way though the quagmire of lures and incentives because our children are too young and inexperienced to decide for themselves whether these are good ideas. We don't allow children to use drugs like alcohol either before they've reached an appropriate age, we don't feed them porn (although it is quite unlikely for them to have missed than the 'net is full of it so they're probably already exposed), we don't put them behind the wheel of a large automobile (to paraphrase the Talking Heads) and now we don't allow them to feed their developing brains to the machine. This is just another part of parenting the denial or refusal of which is just as bad as the denial or refusal to keep your children from the aforementioned hazards. A time will come when they are free to choose whether they want to partake of this madness but that time is not when they're 14 years old.

Sorry, it wasn’t my intent to argue for inaction, but rather that children will eventually come in contact with these things at some point or another. Depending on what they decide to do it might even be a requirement. Personally, I feel that it’s better if that happens while the structure, support, and guardrails provided by parents are still in place rather than shortly after they’ve left the nest and have numerous other things to figure out too. Maybe it doesn’t happen at 14, but instead at 16 or 17, and in highly controlled doses with “less bad” services, and comes with the context of discussions of the pitfalls of such services.

I respect other opinions but it’s difficult to see myself taking a zero-exposure policy as a parent for the simple reason that such policies have made for stumbling blocks and thorns in my side that I’ve been dealing with for the better part of my adult life.