Beyond “Where Were the Parents?”: The Reality of Parenting in an Onlife World
When conversations turn to youth, teens, technology, social media, online gaming, smartphones, artificial intelligence, and internet safety, much of the responsibility is understandably placed on parents and caregivers. We tell parents and caregivers they should learn about the apps their children are using, understand privacy settings, configure parental controls, establish family technology expectations, keep devices out of bedrooms at night, talk about pornography and sextortion, understand cyberbullying, recognize online scams, learn about artificial intelligence, discuss misinformation and deepfakes, monitor gaming environments, understand algorithms and persuasive design, and somehow remain current with a digital environment that can change almost weekly.
Much of this advice is important, and as an organization that has spent almost three decades educating parents and caregivers about digital literacy and internet safety, we certainly believe knowledge matters. However, the more families we speak with, the more we believe there is another part of this conversation that deserves far greater attention. What many parents and caregivers lack isn’t simply knowledge about what they should be doing. In many cases, some lack the structural conditions, particularly time, energy, financial flexibility, digital confidence, social support, and cognitive capacity, that allow them to consistently put that knowledge into practice.
We have come to think of this as “parenting bandwidth.” By parenting bandwidth, we mean the practical capacity a parent or caregiver has at a particular point in their life to translate knowledge and good intentions into action. That capacity can be affected by available time, employment, financial resources, family structure, digital skills, stress, sleep, caregiving responsibilities, the number and ages of children in the home, and the many other competing demands for a parent or caregiver’s attention. Parenting bandwidth is therefore different from parental concern. A parent or caregiver can care deeply about what their child is doing online while still having limited capacity to constantly research, configure, monitor, troubleshoot, discuss, and update every aspect of their child’s digital life.
There is research supporting the broader idea that parents and caregivers don’t enter digital parenting with equal resources. Researchers have described what they call “digital parenting divides,” finding that a parent or caregiver’s economic, social, and cultural resources, together with their digital parenting knowledge, attitudes, and confidence, can influence how they mediate their children’s online activities (1). In other words, digital parenting doesn’t take place on a level playing field. Just as children don’t enter the online world with identical levels of maturity, resilience, skills, vulnerability, or support, parents and caregivers don’t enter digital parenting with identical levels of time, money, technological confidence, education, social support, or practical capacity.
This distinction is important because digital parenting is frequently framed primarily as an information problem. If parents and caregivers simply knew more about Snapchat, TikTok, Discord, Roblox, artificial intelligence, parental controls, privacy, online exploitation, pornography, or whatever the newest digital concern happens to be, then presumably they would be better equipped to protect their children. There is certainly some truth to this, a parent or caregiver who understands how a platform works, recognizes common online risks, knows how to configure basic privacy settings, and understands how their child uses technology has more tools available to them than someone who doesn’t. However, knowing what should be done and having the practical capacity to consistently do it are two very different things. We believe this gap between knowledge and the ability to act upon that knowledge is one of the less discussed challenges in modern digital parenting.
The Reality of Parenting in an Onlife World
Consider the reality of an average weekday in many Canadian homes. A parent or caregiver may wake early, prepare children for school, make lunches, commute to work, spend eight or more hours on the job, commute home, prepare dinner, help with homework, drive a child to hockey, soccer, dance, music lessons, or another activity, deal with laundry and household responsibilities, answer work emails, pay bills, prepare for the following day, and hopefully find some meaningful time to actually connect with their partner and children. In many households, both parents work while managing the increasing costs associated with housing, groceries, transportation, childcare, and everyday living. In single parent homes, one person may be carrying most or all of these responsibilities alone. Other families are caring for aging parents at the same time they are raising children, working rotating shifts, holding multiple jobs, operating small businesses, raising children with additional support needs, or managing countless other responsibilities that rarely appear in conversations about digital parenting. Now add another expectation to that already crowded day, becoming knowledgeable about your child’s constantly evolving digital world.
A parent or caregiver may understand that they should occasionally sit down and explore the apps their 13 year old is using, but understanding that recommendation doesn’t magically create another hour in the evening. A parent or caregiver may know that playing an online game with their child could provide valuable insight into the gaming environment, communication features, and people their child interacts with, but knowing this doesn’t necessarily create two uninterrupted hours on a Wednesday night. A parent or caregiver may understand that they should review privacy settings, parental controls, app permissions, location sharing, content restrictions, communication limits, browser filters, account settings, and purchase permissions, but by the time dinner has been cleaned up, homework completed, lunches prepared, and everyone is getting ready for bed, that task may understandably move to another day.
This is why we need to be careful about interpreting a lack of perfect digital supervision as a lack of parental or caregiver concern. Sometimes the obstacle is knowledge, sometimes it is disengagement, and sometimes parental decisions absolutely deserve examination. However, sometimes the obstacle is simply parenting bandwidth.
Recognizing this does not mean abandoning parental responsibility or excusing genuine parental disengagement. There remains an important difference between a parent or caregiver who lacks the time, knowledge, resources, or support to accomplish everything experts recommend and a parent or caregiver who knowingly provides a very young child with unrestricted access to adult oriented technology without reasonable boundaries, guidance, or supervision. Our argument isn’t that parental responsibility disappears because parenting is difficult. Rather, responsibility needs to be discussed alongside capacity, child development, child agency, education, product design, and the responsibilities of the companies that build the digital environments children increasingly inhabit.
Digital Safety Has Become Another Form of Invisible Parenting
There is also a significant amount of work involved in managing a child’s digital life that is largely invisible to anyone outside the home. Someone has to create accounts, decide whether an app is appropriate, research a new game, configure devices, establish passwords, set up parental controls, approve downloads and purchases, understand why a setting suddenly stopped working after an operating system update, troubleshoot when a parental control blocks something required for school, investigate a strange message that appears on a child’s phone, determine whether a new AI platform is appropriate, and figure out why an application suddenly wants access to a child’s location, microphone, camera, contacts, photographs, or other personal information.
Then there are the conversations. Someone needs to explain why sending an intimate image carries risks, talk about pornography before or after a child encounters it, explain why an online stranger offering free gaming currency may not actually be trying to help, teach children how advertising, influencers, algorithms, and persuasive design can shape behaviour, explain why an AI generated photograph, voice recording, or video may appear authentic even when it isn’t, and teach privacy, consent, healthy relationships, misinformation literacy, digital reputation, scams, cyberbullying, and what to do when something online simply doesn’t feel right. None of these responsibilities individually may appear overwhelming, however, collectively, they represent a substantial additional layer of modern parenting that previous generations did not experience in quite the same way.
The same reality applies to a parent or caregiver’s own technology use. Work follows many adults home through email, messaging platforms, and mobile devices. Schools communicate through digital portals and apps. Sports teams coordinate schedules through group chats. Medical appointments are booked online, bills are paid electronically, banking is digital, families coordinate their lives through text messages, and some employers expect workers to remain reachable beyond traditional working hours. Technology has unquestionably made many parts of life easier, but it has also created another layer of attention and cognitive demand. Parents and caregivers aren’t simply being asked to manage their children’s screen use, they are often managing much of their family life through screens while simultaneously being told to carefully supervise how their children use those same screens.
That is part of the reality of parenting in what we call the “onlife world.” The distinction between online and offline increasingly fails to capture how children, teens, and adults actually live. Technology isn’t somewhere young people occasionally “go”, it’s woven into friendships, education, entertainment, creativity, gaming, relationships, identity, communication, sports, hobbies, and increasingly their future employment. A youth or teenager may use the same device to complete homework, communicate with a teacher, talk with friends, watch entertainment, create content, play games, use artificial intelligence, apply for a job, participate in a sports team group chat, and speak with grandparents who live hundreds of kilometres away. Trying to divide all of this neatly into “online” and “offline” increasingly makes little sense.
Technology Is Moving Faster Than Most Families Can Reasonably Follow
Another challenge is the extraordinary pace of technological change. A parent or caregiver can attend a digital literacy presentation in September, learn about the platforms and risks currently popular among youth, and encounter an entirely new app, artificial intelligence tool, online trend, game, or communication feature several months later. Existing platforms regularly add functions, privacy settings move, artificial intelligence is embedded into products that previously didn’t contain it, games become social environments, social platforms add marketplaces, and messaging platforms add disappearing content. Smart glasses, AI companions, connected toys, wearable devices, and other emerging technologies are continuing to blur the boundaries between our physical and digital environments.
Many parents and caregivers are also guiding their children through technologies they never experienced during their own childhood or adolescence. Most of today’s parents and caregivers didn’t grow up with smartphones in elementary school, personalized social media recommendation systems operating around the clock, generative artificial intelligence capable of creating realistic images and conversations, continuous location sharing between friends, disappearing messages, live streaming, or online games connecting children with people around the world. This is gradually changing as younger generations who grew up with digital technology become parents themselves, but familiarity with technology is not necessarily the same thing as understanding every privacy, safety, developmental, or commercial issue associated with it.
This is why telling parents and caregivers to simply “keep up with technology” isn’t particularly realistic or helpful. No parent or caregiver can know everything about today’s digital environment. We certainly don’t know everything, and this is what we do professionally.
A more sustainable approach is to teach parents and caregivers transferable principles that remain useful when individual technologies change. Privacy, consent, critical thinking, healthy relationships, manipulation, persuasion, emotional regulation, security, help seeking, and understanding how technology companies monetize attention and personal information don’t disappear when one popular platform is replaced by another.
Children Are Participants, Not Simply Recipients
There is another part of digital parenting that can easily be overlooked when we focus heavily on parental controls and supervision, that being children and teens have agency.
Youth and teens are not passive recipients of technology who simply do whatever their parent or caregiver permit. They make choices, negotiate rules, seek independence, experiment, assess risk, teach one another, help friends, hide things, make mistakes, circumvent restrictions, and sometimes understand particular technologies better than the adults around them. As children mature, effective digital parenting therefore becomes less about doing things to children and increasingly about doing things with them.
Technology hasn’t eliminated the fundamental developmental characteristics of childhood and adolescence. Young people still test boundaries, seek independence, respond strongly to peers, explore identity, seek novelty, take risks, make impulsive decisions, and occasionally conceal behaviour from adults. Technology can amplify the speed, reach, visibility, persistence, and consequences of these behaviours, but it didn’t invent them. This matters when people ask, “Where were the parents?”
A parent or caregiver can establish reasonable rules, use parental controls, maintain open communication, understand the technology, and still have a child make a poor decision online. A teenager can know that sharing an intimate image is risky and still send one. A child can understand that they shouldn’t disclose personal information to someone they don’t know and still be manipulated by someone who has spent weeks establishing trust. A young person can understand that online scams exist and still fall for a sophisticated one. Digital safeguards reduce risk, they do not eliminate human behaviour.
The Goal Isn’t Zero Risk
This also requires an important distinction between risk and harm. Encountering online risk does not automatically mean a child will experience harm. At the same time, completely eliminating risk can sometimes eliminate opportunities for learning, creativity, social connection, exploration, independence, and the development of digital skills. Research examining parental mediation has found this tension. Enabling approaches that support children’s digital participation can increase online opportunities while also increasing exposure to some risks, while highly restrictive approaches may reduce exposure to risk but can also reduce opportunities (2). This is why we believe the goal of digital parenting should not be to construct an online environment in which a child never encounters risk. That isn’t realistic, particularly as children move toward adolescence and adulthood.
Think about how we teach children to navigate the physical world. We don’t keep children inside the house until they turn 18 because roads, strangers, playgrounds, bicycles, vehicles, and public spaces contain risks, instead, we gradually scaffold independence. A young child crosses the street holding a parent’s hand. Later, we teach them to stop, look, listen, and assess traffic. Eventually they cross independently, and years later, many will now learn to drive. Protection gradually transitions into competence.
We believe digital parenting should ultimately follow a similar trajectory. Early childhood may appropriately involve substantial parental control and supervision. As a child demonstrates maturity, knowledge, judgment, and resilience, some controls can gradually give way to increasing independence. The destination isn’t permanent parental or caregiver surveillance, the destination is a young adult capable of navigating the onlife world when their parent is no longer standing beside them, either inside or outside the home.
The Problem With “Where Were the Parents?”
When something goes wrong online involving a child, one of the questions we frequently see asked is, “Where were the parents?” Sometimes parental decisions absolutely deserve examination, particularly when very young children are provided unrestricted access to technologies primarily designed for adults. However, this question is too often used as a simple explanation for complicated situations. It assumes that if a child encountered pornography, communicated with a stranger, experienced sextortion, circumvented a parental control, downloaded an inappropriate app, or became involved in harmful online behaviour, someone must have failed to properly supervise them. Sometimes a parent or caregiver did make a poor decision, and we shouldn’t be afraid to say that. However, sometimes:
The parent or caregiver was working.
They were exhausted.
Another child needed their attention.
They genuinely didn’t know.
The technology changed.
A safeguard failed.
The child found a way around it.
A sophisticated offender deliberately exploited a child’s vulnerability.
A platform placed a child into an environment a parent did not reasonably anticipate, and
Despite parents and caregivers doing many things right, something still went wrong.
Just as locks on our doors reduce the likelihood of certain crimes but cannot guarantee our homes will never be broken into, digital safeguards can reduce online risk without eliminating it.
Parents and caregivers who believe they are expected to prevent every possible online mistake may begin to view every negative experience as evidence that they have failed. A healthier and more realistic objective is to reduce preventable risk, increase children’s skills and resilience, and create relationships in which young people are more likely to seek help when something does go wrong.
Relationship Before Dependency
This is why we continue to emphasize what we call the human element. Yes, parental controls matter, privacy settings matter, content filters matter, age appropriate boundaries matter, digital literacy education matters, corporate accountability matters, and thoughtful legislation matters. However, none should become the sole foundation of a family’s approach to digital safety because every technological safeguard has limitations. At the centre of effective digital parenting should be something technology cannot manufacture, a healthy relationship between a parent or caregiver and their child built around communication, curiosity, trust, connection, boundaries, and support.
Research examining parental mediation and problematic internet and gaming behaviours reinforces the importance of the family context. A systematic review found that no single type of parental mediation was consistently associated with lower problematic screen use across the studies examined. Active mediation showed some potentially beneficial associations, while restrictive mediation produced mixed findings. More importantly, family cohesion was associated with lower rates of problematic internet and gaming behaviours, while family conflict was associated with higher rates. The authors also cautioned that much of the research was observational and that stronger research is still needed (3).
If a child believes admitting an online mistake will immediately result in punishment, humiliation, judgment, or permanent loss of their device, they may work very hard to hide what happened. If that same child believes their parent will listen first, help them understand what happened, and work alongside them to find a solution, they may be more likely to seek help before a difficult situation becomes a crisis.
This doesn’t mean becoming your child’s best friend or abandoning reasonable consequences, parenting still requires boundaries. Relationship before dependency means that technology should support parenting rather than become a substitute for it. As we like to say here at the White Hatter, “Be your child’s best parent and not their best friend when it comes to their use of technology.”
A parental control may prevent a particular app from being downloaded today, but eventually that child will have a device without parental controls. Our larger goal should therefore be to help youth and teens develop the judgment, skills, confidence, resilience, and critical thinking they will eventually need to navigate the onlife world independently. This philosophy is at the heart of our free web book for parents and caregivers, “The Human Element.” Rather than focusing solely on parental controls, restrictions, or monitoring, the book explores how parents can build these human skills through connection, communication, curiosity, education, and age appropriate scaffolding as their child grows and develops (4).
Parents Are Also Digital Role Models
There is another uncomfortable but important part of this conversation. Youth and teens don’t only learn about technology from what adults tell them, they also learn from what adults do. Parents and caregivers have legitimate reasons to use their phones. The parent looking at their phone may not be scrolling social media, they may be responding to an employer, checking tomorrow’s school schedule, communicating with a child’s coach, paying a bill, or answering a message from an aging parent. This is another reason simplistic judgments about technology use can be misleading.
At the same time, research has increasingly examined “parental technoference,” where technology interrupts or interferes with parent child interaction. A 2023 scoping review involving 64 studies found evidence of changes in parent and child behaviour associated with parental technology use during parenting interactions, while also identifying limitations and gaps in the research (5).
We don’t believe this should become yet another source of parental guilt. The solution isn’t to tell already overwhelmed parents and caregivers that they must now model perfect technology behaviour as well. Rather, it provides another opportunity for intentional parenting. Occasionally putting our own phone away, explaining why we are using it, acknowledging when technology is distracting us, and demonstrating healthy boundaries can itself become a form of digital literacy education. Youth and teens notice what we model as much as what we monitor!
Digital Safety Is a Shared Responsibility
Recognizing parenting bandwidth also requires us to rethink the idea that digital safety rests primarily on the shoulders of individual parents. Parents and caregivers absolutely have responsibilities, but so do youth and teens as they mature. Schools have responsibilities, communities have responsibilities, technology companies have responsibilities, and governments and regulators have responsibilities. These responsibilities shouldn’t be viewed as competing with one another, they should operate as layers of protection and support.
At the centre is the developing child and their growing skills, judgment, resilience, and agency. Around that child are family relationships, parental guidance, boundaries and supervision. Schools and communities can reinforce digital and media literacy. Technology companies can build safety, privacy, accessibility, and developmentally appropriate protections into their products. Public policy can establish reasonable expectations and accountability where necessary, no single layer is sufficient.
If protecting a youth or teen requires a parent or caregiver to navigate fifteen menus, understand complicated privacy terminology, locate obscure settings, install several applications, and constantly check whether those settings have changed, we shouldn’t automatically conclude that the parent or caregiver is the problem when something gets missed. Safety and privacy features should be understandable, accessible, developmentally appropriate, and enabled by design where appropriate. Parents and caregivers should be part of the safety equation, but they shouldn’t be expected to compensate for every product design decision made by some of the largest technology companies in the world.
Similarly, digital literacy shouldn’t begin and end at the kitchen table. Youth and teens spend significant portions of their lives at school, participating in extracurricular activities, interacting with peers, and using technology beyond direct parental supervision. Teaching young people how to think critically, recognize manipulation, protect personal information, respond to uncomfortable interactions, understand consent, evaluate information, and seek help should be viewed as a shared educational responsibility. The question should therefore not simply be, “Who is responsible?”, a more useful question is, “How should responsibility be shared across an ecosystem in which no single person or safeguard can eliminate every risk?”
We Need to Make Digital Parenting Achievable
If we genuinely want parents and caregivers to become more engaged in their children’s digital lives, digital literacy education needs to respect the realities of family life. Handing an exhausted parent another 60 item digital safety checklist may technically provide information, but it may not provide meaningful help.
We need to identify the actions that provide the greatest practical benefit and teach principles that transfer from one technology to another. Parents and caregivers don’t need to memorize every feature of every social media platform if they understand broader concepts such as privacy, consent, manipulation, healthy relationships, critical thinking, security, help seeking, and how platforms may monetize attention and personal information.
This is also why research cautioning against simplistic assumptions about parental mediation matters. Different strategies can produce different outcomes, and research has not demonstrated that simply increasing restriction or monitoring automatically produces healthier digital behaviour. Digital parenting therefore shouldn’t become a competition to see which parent or caregiver can install the most controls, it should be about helping youth and teens progressively develop the ability to control themselves.
If Your Parenting Bandwidth Is Limited, Start Here
If you are a parent or caregiver reading this and thinking, “This sounds great, but I barely have enough time already,” we believe there are five places worth prioritizing:
1/ Connection: Make sure your child knows they can come to you when something goes wrong online. Establish that asking for help won’t automatically result in punishment or permanent loss of their technology.
2/ Access: Particularly with younger children, know the major devices, games, applications, accounts, and platforms they are using. You don’t need to understand every button or feature, but you should have a reasonable understanding of the digital environments your child regularly occupies.
3/ Boundaries: Establish a small number of clear, developmentally appropriate family expectations. These might involve where devices sleep at night, when phones are put away, what requires parental permission, spending expectations, privacy, or who a younger child can communicate with online.
4/ Conversation: Talk regularly rather than waiting for something to go wrong. Privacy, consent, pornography, sextortion, misinformation, scams, AI, cyberbullying, healthy relationships, influencers, advertising, and online behaviour don’t all need to be covered in one giant family meeting.
5/ Help Seeking: Make sure both you and your child know that some online situations require immediate adult help. Threats, sextortion, sexual exploitation, intimate image abuse, predatory contact, credible threats of violence, or situations where a child feels unsafe should never be treated as something a young person has to manage alone.
These five things won’t eliminate every online risk, nothing will. However, they create a practical starting point.
Sometimes Five Minutes Is Enough to Start
Parents also need permission to start small. Digital parenting doesn’t require sitting down every Sunday evening for a two hour family seminar on internet safety. Some of the most useful conversations can occur in small moments throughout everyday life, we think of these as digital micro-conversations.
A news story about an AI deepfake can become a five minute conversation about misinformation. An influencer promoting a product can become a discussion about advertising and persuasion. A strange text message can become a lesson about scams. A television show can create an opportunity to talk about consent or healthy relationships. A video game can become a conversation about online friendships, spending, sportsmanship, or what to do when another player becomes abusive. The objective isn’t the length of the conversation, it’s creating an ongoing pattern in which digital life is something families can talk about naturally.
Instead of one enormous lecture after something goes wrong, parents and caregivers can weave small conversations into everyday family life. Over time, those conversations can help communicate one of the most important messages a youth or teen can hear, “You can talk to me about what happens online.”
Supporting Youth and Teens Also Means Supporting Parents and Caregivers
The broader conversation about youth, teens, and technology needs to become more realistic and more supportive of the people doing the parenting. Parents and caregivers absolutely have responsibilities when it comes to their children’s technology use, and we should continue providing them with evidence informed education, practical strategies, and tools that help them fulfil those responsibilities. However, we also need to recognize the conditions in which modern parenting is taking place.
When a parent or caregiver doesn’t know about the newest app, it doesn’t automatically mean they don’t care.
When parental controls haven’t been perfectly configured, it doesn’t necessarily mean someone is disengaged.
When a youth or teen encounters online risk, it doesn’t automatically mean they have been harmed.
When something harmful does happen, it doesn’t automatically mean the parent or caregiver failed.
Sometimes parents and caregivers make mistakes, sometimes youth and teens make mistakes, sometimes technology fails, sometimes safeguards work exactly as intended but a determined young person finds a way around them, sometimes an offender deliberately manipulates a child, sometimes product design contributes to risk, and sometimes several factors converge at once. This complexity is precisely why reducing every negative digital experience to, “Where were the parents?”, sometimes does little to help youth, teens, or families.
Digital literacy remains incredibly important, but knowledge alone cannot solve every challenge families face in today’s onlife world. If we genuinely want to help parents and caregivers raise safer, healthier, more resilient children, we need to do more than continually tell parents and caregivers what they should be doing. We need to make digital literacy practical and accessible, we need schools and communities to reinforce these skills, we need technology companies to design products with safety, privacy, and developmental appropriateness in mind, and we need thoughtful public policy that recognizes the shared responsibility involved in protecting young people. Most importantly, we need to acknowledge that parents and caregivers are human too, with finite time, finite energy, competing responsibilities, financial pressures, jobs, relationships, households, and lives to manage.
The goal should never be the perfectly informed, perfectly vigilant digital parent or caregiver who sees everything, knows everything, monitors everything, and prevents every mistake. That parent or caregiver doesn’t exist, and setting that as the standard creates guilt rather than meaningful change. Instead, we believe the goal should be an informed, engaged, and curious parent or caregiver who understands enough to provide reasonable guidance, who continues learning alongside their child, who establishes age appropriate boundaries, who gradually expands independence as their child demonstrates readiness, and who has built a relationship strong enough that when something inevitably goes sideways online, their child knows exactly who they can turn to.
We need to reconsider how we measure successful digital parenting. It shouldn’t simply be measured by how much technology a parent or caregivers can monitor, restrict, filter, or control. An equally important measure is whether, over time, we are progressively equipping a youth or teen with the judgment, skills, confidence, resilience, critical thinking, and help seeking abilities they will need to manage technology when we aren’t there. That is the destination of effective digital scaffolding.
We have spent years treating digital parenting primarily as a knowledge and supervision problem. We believe it is time to recognize that it is also a capacity problem. Once we recognize the reality of parenting bandwidth, we can begin building digital safety approaches that work with parents and caregivers rather than simply adding more responsibilities to an already overflowing list.
If we truly want to support youth and teens in today’s onlife world, we also need to support the parents and caregivers who are raising them. That is something we pride ourselves on here at The White Hatter!
Digital Food For Thought
The White Hatter
Facts Not Fear, Facts Not Emotions, Enlighten Not Frighten, Know Tech Not No Tech
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