As parents, we do our best to teach our kids how to stay safe online. We put limits on screen time. We use the settings available on their devices to help protect their privacy and reduce their exposure to potential dangers.

But those steps still leave room for risk, partly because reliable age verification systems are not currently the norm. It’s a problem I have been grappling with for years, both as a parent and as the founder and CEO of Snapchat, a tech platform that proudly serves tens of millions of young Americans every day.

Snapchat is a visual communications platform for people 13 and older — and we work hard to detect and remove accounts that violate our age policy.

In our efforts to prevent underage use, we have grappled with the same challenges to age verification that virtually every platform must confront. Privacy concerns are legitimate; verification systems require the collection of large amounts of personal information, create cybersecurity risks and invite the potential for misuse of sensitive data. Technical problems exist, too, from fake IDs to flawed algorithms.

Despite these issues, the demand for better online age verification is growing. After all, in the physical world, society has established age-based restrictions for certain activities, including driving, voting and watching certain films. These guardrails exist for good reason, and reflect our understanding of developmental stages and the capacity for responsible decision-making. There's no reason why the digital world should operate by entirely different rules.

In fact, some argue that the digital environment warrants even more careful age-appropriate boundaries. When technology........

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