Legislation Has Its Place, However, Parenting Still Comes First.
- The White Hatter
- 11 minutes ago
- 5 min read
Across Canada and around the world, governments are thinking about, or have introduced laws intended to reduce online harm to children and teens. These varied efforts include regulating social media design, strengthening data protection, introducing age-gating measures, and increasing platform accountability. These legislative actions matter! Companies should be held to standards that reduce exploitation, limit harm, and protect user privacy. We definitely believe that the “right” legislation can help to shape safer digital environments. However, regulation should never replace onlife parenting which is the keystone to keeping our youth and teens safer in today’s onlife world.
Legislation can play an important role in reducing systemic risk and holding companies accountable, but it cannot teach young people how to think, pause, or make sound decisions online. Laws do not build judgment, self-regulation, empathy, values, or critical thinking. Those skills are developed over time through guidance, modelling, and real-world experience. When it comes to youth and teens navigating technology, the internet, and social media, these human skills cannot be legislated, they must be learned.
Waiting for government to fully protect children online reflects a classic Nirvana Fallacy. It assumes that if we design the right law, the problem will be solved. In reality, laws can influence corporate behaviour, but they cannot influence how a young person responds to peer pressure, processes social comparison, or decides what to do when something feels wrong online. Legislation and regulation can reduce exposure to risk, but it cannot prepare a child to handle risk when it inevitably appears, which it will, no matter what legislation is put in place. Legislation cannot prevent all undesirable behaviour online, but it can give governments and parents the authority to hold companies accountable when they fail to meet a reasonable standard of safety, security, and privacy for children.
Governments exist to regulate industries, not to raise and parent children. Laws can require safer defaults, restrict exploitative design, and limit data misuse. They should do all of those things. What laws cannot do is sit at the dinner table, notice a shift in mood, model restraint, teach digital literacy, or help a child work through disappointment and frustration that they may come across online. Those responsibilities have always belonged to parents and caregivers, but in our experience, are often neglected by some.
Part of the challenge we face today is cultural, many parents feel pressured to adopt certain views or language or risk being publicly shamed or excluded. Many parents have been discouraged from exercising parental or caregiver authority. Boundaries are often framed as harmful, outdated, or controlling. Discomfort is treated as something to be avoided rather than worked through. In technology conversations especially, parents and caregivers are sometimes led to believe that saying “no” will damage their relationship with their child, or put them socially behind their peers. Sometimes, it’s just easier to give in so that a parent or caregiver does not have to deal with the foreseeable conflict that will arise when it comes to parenting technology.
Over time, we have repeatedly seen that this approach leads to real and lasting consequences. When parents and caregivers avoid setting limits because they fear conflict or pushback, children learn that boundaries are negotiable and that external enforcement is required to stop harmful behaviour. In that vacuum, legislation starts to feel like a parenting tool, rather than what it truly is, a policy tool aimed at corporate systems.
Being parent or caregiver led does not mean being authoritarian. It means being responsible. Young people need adults who are willing to make decisions that may be unpopular in the moment, but protective in the long run. Healthy parenting could includes saying:
“Not yet.”
“This is not appropriate.”
“I understand you want this, and the answer is still no.”
“We will revisit this when you are ready.”
These moments are not failures of empathy. They are expressions of care, an important distinction. This is why we have been saying for the past two decades, “be your child’s best parent and not their best friend when it comes to their use of technology”, there is a difference!
We recognize that this is especially difficult when a youth or teen’s peers already have access to technology and their own child does not. In those situations, legislation can feel helpful because it gives parents something external to point to and say, “This isn’t just our rule, it’s the law.” That support can matter for sure. However, at the same time, many of the most important boundaries families need to set are not, and never will be, backed by legislation. Setting those limits anyway is not a failure of regulation, it is effective parenting.
Another often overlooked part of the digital safety conversation is parental modelling. Children and teens closely observe how the adults in their lives use technology, often more than we realize. They notice when our phones come out at the dinner table or in a restaurant, when we scroll during conversations, or when we are physically present at their games or activities but mentally elsewhere given that our heads are buried in a phone. They pick up on our emotional reactions to online content, our habit of doomscrolling, and the ways we seek validation through likes, comments, and shares. Over time, these behaviours quietly set the standard for what feels normal and acceptable online, shaping how young people come to use technology themselves.
This is one of the clearest examples of why legislation cannot replace parenting. Laws cannot model balance, they cannot demonstrate restraint, and they cannot show how to disengage from content that provokes outrage or anxiety. Young people do not learn healthy technology habits from lectures or policies. They learn by watching parents and caregivers first, then try those behaviours themselves to see how they fit and whether they work for them.
If we want youth and teens to pause, disconnect, and think critically, we adults have to demonstrate those behaviours ourselves.
Our position here at the White Hatter, legislation and regulation is needed and should buttress parenting, not replace it. Governments should focus on regulating companies, and not nanny legislation that focus on children and families. Legislation and regulations should enforcing safer design standards, transparency, meaningful data protection, and limits on exploitative practices. These legislative measures can create environments that are less harmful for everyone. (1)
What no law can replace are the fundamentals of parenting:
Ongoing conversations at home
Clear family expectations
Modelled behaviour
Accountability and follow-through
Trust built over time
Parents and caregivers are not powerless when it comes to technology, despite the narrative that often suggests they are. (2) They are not outdated, irrelevant, or in need of permission from lawmakers to guide their children. What they need is confidence, support, education, and the reminder that discomfort is not danger, saying no is not harmful, setting boundaries is not cruel, and being parent led is not oppressive, it’s being protective, there is a difference!
Active onlife shepherding involves ongoing parental modelling, parental supervision, parental involvement, parental guidance (scaffolding, technical safety, technical skills), parental participatory learning, parental monitoring, and providing developmentally appropriate access to the right tech at the right time when it comes to our kids. However, it is important to remember that this could differ from family to family and child to child.
The “right” legislation and regulations absolutely have a role to play in reducing systemic harm. They can build guardrails that make digital spaces safer. However, guardrails do not steer, parents and caregivers do. We get it, this takes effort, but this is our responsibility as a parent or caregiver, not government.
The good evidence based research thus far is clear, when parents and caregivers step into their authority, model healthy tech behaviour, and lead with clarity and consistency, youth and teens are far better equipped to navigate the onlife world than any law alone could ever achieve.
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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