Welcome to The Tools for Parents Blog

One common trope is that “parents need to do a better job monitoring their kids’ online activity”.  As our name implies, The Tools for Parents is advocating for providing parents with better tools to help with this responsibility.  The subject we are currently featuring is an age verification mechanism that has been signed into law in California and Colorado.

Here are the details:

In October of 2025, California signed into law AB-1043, “Age Verification Signals: Software Applications and Online Services”. This law requires that people enter the birthday of the primary user when initially setting up the phone. Many state laws require an app, website, etc. to use commercially available third-party age verification services as an age verification mechanism. In addition to that age verification, this law requires that app developers, website developers, etc.  build into their products the initial step of age verification by using the birthday of the user, the birthday that was entered when the phone was initially set up. 

This mechanism will start to go into effect in January of 2027 in California.  Colorado has used this law as a blueprint for their state law, SB26-051 “Age Attestation on Computing Devices”.  This was signed into law in June of 2026, and will begin to go into effect in July 2028

Final Comments:

The idea of a setting up additional age verification at the time of setup is simple common sense.   

Most people would agree with the intention of making the internet/social media safe for kids. The question is one of priorities.