Science & Tech Quote by Mike Fitzpatrick

"Parents have the ability to screen their children's Internet access at home" is the kind of tidy assurance politicians reach for when a policy problem is messy, expensive, and politically risky. Mike Fitzpatrick frames online safety as a private household choice, not a public responsibility. The phrasing matters: "ability" signals that the tools already exist, so the remaining issue is willpower and vigilance. "Screen" implies a manageable filter you can place between a child and the web, as if the Internet were a TV channel lineup rather than a sprawling, participatory ecosystem.

The subtext is classic governance triage. By locating the solution in the home, Fitzpatrick sidesteps the thornier questions: platform accountability, data collection on minors, design features engineered for compulsion, and the uneven reality that not every parent has the time, literacy, or stable bandwidth to police devices. It's a statement that sounds empowering while quietly offloading liability. If harm occurs, the implied failure isn't systemic; it's parental.

Contextually, this line fits a long American tradition of treating digital risk as a moral and parenting issue before treating it as an infrastructure and consumer-protection issue. It reassures voters wary of regulation and wary, too, of a nanny state. The rhetorical move is efficient: it flatters parents as capable guardians, avoids antagonizing tech companies, and keeps government in the role of scolding coach rather than rule-maker. The irony is that the more connected childhood becomes, the less plausible it is that "at home" is a meaningful boundary.