My name is Myron Tsosie. I am Diné, a proud member of the Navajo Nation, and I reside in Chinle, Arizona, where I have spent my life serving the people of this community. Since 2014, I have served on the Chinle Unified School District School Board, working alongside local, state and national leaders in both the House and Senate on issues that matter to our students and families. The children of our community are currently left vulnerable to real harm coming from the online world, and the parents who want to protect them have not been given the tools they need to do so.

What is happening to our kids online is a serious problem, and the answers coming from lawmakers so far have not been good enough.

Social media is part of life for young people here, just as it is everywhere. It connects our students to family, information, and communities they might not otherwise find. Social media is a way young people share Diné traditions and keep our culture alive. It is also connecting our young people to the broader world while allowing them to live and practice our way of life at home. I have seen it help kids who felt alone. I take that seriously. But I have also sat with worried, frustrated parents who do not know what tools they have to protect their children. That is a problem we have to fix.

What we are doing right now is not working. States are each passing their own laws. Some require social media companies to verify ages on their own, one app at a time. Others are trying to restrict certain kinds of content. Others want outright bans. Every state is doing something different, and none of it adds up to a real solution. Diné parents in Chinle should not have to figure out which rules apply to their family based on which state’s law their child’s phone falls under. We need Congress to act, and there is a bill before them right now that I believe gets this right. The App Store Accountability Act would require age to be verified at the app store level, one time, when a phone is set up. From that point forward, a parent would have to approve their child’s app downloads. That is it. One process. One place. Parents are in control.

There is another reason I prefer this approach. When you require age verification app by app, you are asking families to hand over their children’s personal information to a long list of companies. I do not trust all of those companies to handle that data with care. Some of them have not earned that trust. The more places that data lives, the more chances there are for something to go wrong. Keeping verification in one place, through the app store, limits that exposure. It means our kids’ information is not scattered across dozens of platforms, each with its own security practices and its own incentives. That is important to me.

I also want to be clear about what will not work. There is another proposal in Congress called the Parents Over Platforms Act. It sounds good, but when you look at what it actually requires, it falls short. It does not verify anyone’s age. It just asks users to state their age. A child can say they are 18, and that answer is passed along to every app without a check. Parents are explicitly asking for a parental-approval mechanism to help them stay in the loop on their kids’ downloads. A system without verification does not provide that. Our kids and parents deserve better than that.

Arizona’s members of Congress need to hear from people in their communities on this. The problem is happening in every state. The solution has to come from Washington. I am asking them to support the App Store Accountability Act and give parents the tools they have been asking for.

Our Diné children are watching what we do. Let us make sure we are doing something that actually helps them.

Rep. Myron Tsosie is the Democratic state representative of Legislative District 6.