Cyber Law

Online
Post
Children’s Autonomy Rights Online
Clare Ryan
Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Alabama School of Law

She thanks Esther Hong, Zalman Rothschild, and Lisa Washington, as well as the participants and organizers of the University of Chicago’s 2023 Law Review Symposium on Children and the Law.

Children’s lives are increasingly shaped by their online environment, quite apart from the physical geographies of home and school. How they make choices in that space, and how those choices are shaped by law and parental authority, warrants deeper discussion than the Restatement of Children and the Law was able to provide. The complex challenges of children’s engagement with social media, both as content creators and consumers, help illuminate some of the core tensions in this Part of the Restatement—namely, the tension between children’s autonomy, parental authority, and state regulation.