You can’t control your kid’s safety online. But that doesn’t mean you’re powerless.
Parents are told that keeping kids safe online is their responsibility, but by itself, no amount of good parenting is enough in the current online world.
When was the last time you checked all the parental controls on your kids’ devices? Be honest. Every laptop, browser, tablet, and app? The gaming console, their smartphone? Have you checked that grandparents, babysitters, and other caregivers have parental controls on their devices? When did you last check in with the parents of your kids’ friends about tech rules in their homes?
Is this list making you feel anxious? Guilty? Exhausted? Yeah, it’s meant to.
As parents, we are told that keeping our kids safe online is our responsibility. It’s there in tech companies’ ad campaigns, in the media, and in advice from so-called parenting experts.
Search for parental controls, and a long list of articles like “5 easy ways to keep your kids safe online” and “Parents’ Ultimate Guide to Online Safety” gives the impression that if you just follow this guide, you will be in control of what happens to your child online. Even the name “parental control” makes us think we have it — control.
But we don’t.
Tech companies and online privacy advocates want parents to believe we are entirely in charge of keeping our kids safe online. If the onus is on parents, it’s off of the tech companies who design these highly unregulated platforms to be addictive, enticing, and wide-open to a global array of bad actors who seek to harm children.
The fact is that no amount of good parenting is enough in the current online world.
Yes, parents can and should set boundaries and model good digital behavior.
Yes, parental controls do exist on most platforms, and they give some level of protection.
But often these controls are riddled with bugs, can be difficult to navigate, and parents must be tech savvy enough — never mind have the time and the will — to be able to install them on all of the many devices and apps kids use.
Children and teens can also easily circumvent parental controls, and perpetrators lie about their age to pose as a child or a teen in order to harm them.
The many potential online harms make for a grotesque laundry list: sextortion, grooming, pornographic exposure, live filming of sex acts, self-generated nude photos, and so on.
Our children can see, view, and experience all these things — and be victimized — on any platform. Worse, online harm can lead to offline harm — physical abuse, suicide, trafficking, even murder.
In the U.S., there are no existing laws to hold tech companies accountable for this content proliferation, or what happens to children if they are exploited or abused. Instead, harmful content proliferates and bad actors perpetrate crimes on their platforms, while tech companies cannot be held liable. All of which puts the burden of responsibility on parents to keep kids safe.
The fact is that no amount of good parenting is enough in the current online world.
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children reports that between 2021 and 2023, the number of online enticement reports — which includes sextortion of children and teens — increased by more than 300%. In 2023, there were 36.2 million reports of child sexual abuse imagery made. So if parental controls do work, they don’t work very well.
In January 2024, I was in the U.S. Senate hearing room when the five Big Tech CEOs were compelled to testify on online safety. The audience was made up almost entirely of survivors of abuse and parents, many of whom had lost their children to suicide. These CEOs were grilled by senators from both parties, and it was clear: Big Tech is to blame for this crisis.
Yet, despite the media attention and progress at the state level, we still have no meaningful federal laws that will hold tech companies accountable for what they allow on their platforms. There is an enormous power imbalance between the tech companies whose platforms and devices rule our lives and the kids and adults using their products. Tech companies have the resources, funding, and the power to control the narrative through advertising, lobbying, and blocking legislation.
Parents have a key role to play in this crisis. But not in the way the tech lobby wants us to think. It is not up to us to keep kids safe online. The problem is too big, and the tools we are given are far too inadequate. We need policymakers on both sides to continue to be brave and fight to protect children, and we need Big Tech’s cooperation to support reasonable legislation that will make their platforms safer for all of our kids. Until that happens, there are some other things we as parents can do:
Contact your representatives in Congress and tell them to support online safety legislation.
Find out what your kids’ schools, the local school board, and your state representatives are doing — or not doing — around online safety.
Don’t be afraid to talk to your friends, family, and other parents.
The Senate hearing helped to grow momentum toward enacting online safety policy changes, and momentum hangs in the balance with the new administration. But this is not a time to back down. It is up to us to be angry and to harness our power as parents — collectively. That is the only way we can begin to take control to keep our kids safe online.
Erin Nicholson is the strategic communications adviser for ChildFund International, a global nonprofit dedicated to protecting children online and offline. ChildFund launched the #TakeItDown campaign in 2023 to combat online child sexual abuse material. Find out more at takeitdown.childfund.org. She is a Public Voices Fellow on Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse with The OpEd Project.