Texas Gov. Greg Abbot recently signed into law a bill that would require phone users under 18 to seek “parental approval before they can download apps or make in-app purchases.” No longer can children and teenagers download apps like Instagram and TikTok immediately after their parents buy them a smartphone. They will need to ask their parent to present ID to approve of the download.

For parents who bought their children such attention-hogging, soul-sucking distraction devices for ostensibly safety and studying, they now have more power to simply say no to brain rot. While some parents may be completely fine with sending their child into a deep, dark spiral of insecurity and screen addiction, most parents would prefer limiting their children’s phone use, but don’t know how. By setting up this hurdle, the task becomes much easier.

Of course, some object this invades users’ privacy and curtails their personal freedoms. These are usually the people who insist that parents are on their own at policing their children’s exposure to corrupting influences. After all, parents can change the settings on the phone, or they can just forego buying their children smartphones. Why bring in the government to enforce a verification system for the consumption of online content?

Because the government has a responsibility to protect moral and mental health of the community, which means regulating products that harm people, especially children. Most people understand this principle for alcohol, cigarettes, and drugs, all physical products that must be consumed responsibly or banned outright.

However, more confusion arises when the harmful product is digital. Only recently have state governments, and now the federal government, begun proposing and implementing laws restricting access to online pornography. Even if people protest that this infringes on their right to easily accessible pornography, such laws are simply the online version of what is already done with offline pornography.

In the same way, various addictive apps that impair users’ cognitive and social development cannot be the default setting on a device that most people need to operate in modern society. It doesn’t matter that these apps are on a screen. On an individual level, they have the same deleterious effects as many illegal drugs. On a societal level, they are a major contributor to crashing birthrates, mass depression, and declining IQ.

This may sound like hyperbole, but I have seen this firsthand as a high school English teacher. Nearly all my students have smartphones, and nearly all of them struggle with some kind of screen addiction. Setting aside the massive problem of cheating, these otherwise bright and capable kids cannot focus on texts for long or delve into deeper ideas, much less appreciate the importance and purpose of thinking at a higher level.

Worse still, they cannot socialize — which is supposed to be the main selling point for formal education. I used to worry about students being too chatty with their classmates while I was teaching. Now I welcome any inane discussion that pulls them away from the smartphone they hide under their desks.

Unless their parents make a concerted effort to deal with the smartphone, the great majority of these kids will never come close to reaching their full potential as adults, nor will they get to enjoy meaningful relationships with the people around them. They will become incomplete human beings whose brains have been irreparably malformed through so many mindless hours on their devices.

So yes, any law that empowers parents to have a say in the apps their children download is a great improvement. The bigger question is: Why Texas is only the second state (Utah is the first) to make such a law? Are most state legislators and governors really swayed by the arguments, or is something else happening?

Well, Apple CEO Tim Cook visited Abbott a few weeks ago to try to persuade him to veto the bill. Evidently, his appeals for children’s unlimited access to apps and his likely offers of financial kickbacks and discounts on Apple products were insufficient. If anything, Cook’s presence primarily reinforces the argument that inundating young people with digital content is fueled by corporate greed, not any robust evidence that apps help them.

Hopefully, Texas will be the first among all states to begin the much-needed process of regulating screens. The next step would be to follow Virginia and New York’s examples of prohibiting smartphones on campuses during school hours.

While school districts across the country have tried to incorporate phones into instruction for more than a decade, they have largely become electronic sedatives that profoundly disrupt learning. And it would mean little for parents newly enabled to control how their children use a smartphone only to be undermined at school where students would easily find others to download addictive apps for them.

More than anything else, today’s kids need to see digital technology as helpful (yet ultimately boring) tools. Indeed, this was the plan when these devices were originally introduced. The real fun should come when people finally look up from screens and begin engaging in the physical world.