Social Media and the Role of Parents: How Do We Protect Children from the Dark Corners of the Internet?

To become responsible adults, children and teens need freedom, and they need to be encouraged to take reasonable risks and independent responsibilities. At the same time, they need boundaries. It is the primary responsibility and right of parents, with the support of other caring adults, to channel children and adolescents down the right path.

Unless you’re Plato, Marx, or a celebrated communist academic, you probably agree with the above statements and subscribe to the principles, expressed by both the US Supreme Court and in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, that “those who nurture [a child] and direct his [or her] destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations. Pierce v. Soc'y of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510, 535, 45 S. Ct. 571, 573 (1925)

“Setting boundaries and expectations for children can assist in building life skills that include; patience, problem solving, resourcefulness, responsibility and self-discipline,” writes Stephen Bavolek. For children who struggle with understanding social norms, such as those on the autism spectrum, boundaries provide a sense of security and helps those who feel “different” better fit in to their community.

At the same time, allowing children to explore the world and take on independent responsibilities helps them build resilience and self-discipline. Parents can’t be and shouldn’t be directing every step of a child’s life, because doing so creates an adult who can’t independently navigate the world.

My concern in the modern world is that it’s becoming increasingly difficult for parents to provide that proper balance between providing freedom and creating guardrails. When I was growing up in the 1970s and early 1980s, it was easier. My parents might have been worried about peer influence, but at least they knew my peers and my peers’ parents. They had a pretty good idea of what I was being taught in school. Although I’m sure they worried about what I might see on TV or in magazines available at the local convenience store, they also knew that, as part of a community, most people with whom I’d come into contact shared their values.

Today’s parents don’t have that security of knowing what their children may be exposed to. Once a child is handed a smart phone, an iPad, or a computer, he or she has access to both positive sources of information as well as addictive social media accounts full of groomers, lurkers, and foul predators. When I was a child concerned about hitting puberty late and trying to figure out why I felt inadequate, I could sneak in my father’s office and read his medical books. Children today can go on social media and learn that their eating disorder is a wonderful thing; that if they feel uncomfortable with themselves, that they might be trapped in the wrong body. AI chatbots have been accused of sexualizing children and encouraging them to kill their parents. Studies have shown that, perhaps especially for more vulnerable children and adolescents, social media can serve as an incubator for mental illnesses such as dissociative personality disorder.

Before social media, most of a youth’s peers were too busy dealing with their own childhood and adolescent conflicts to be too much of an influence, and there were adults usually hanging around to intervene in case of bullying or behavioral concerns. Now, thanks to social media algorithms, an awkward young person can be dragged into a world in which she receives a constant, pathologically-reaffirming reminder that she is defective and the only solution is self-harm, violence against others, or withdrawal from friends and family into a nihilistic community.

What’s the appropriate response?

One option is legal action. A number of states have enacted age-verification laws to keep children off addictive social media sites without parental consent, but social media companies have won injunctions against many of those laws on the basis that they infringe on the First Amendment — either the child’s right to access information and/or the businesses’ rights to provide information. The Supreme Court recently upheld a Texas law requiring age verification for pornography sites, but it’s unclear whether that precedent will be applied to the social media cases currently winding through the courts.

Another option is parental action both at home and in the public sphere.

In the public sphere. Whatever happens with the court cases, it’s important for parents to remember that even though elected officials in many states have responded to parental concern over social media by adopting laws regulating children’s access, companies that are part of NetChoice have filed litigation demanding continued access to children. Here’s a list (according to Wikipedia, as of January 2025) of the companies that are funding this consortium. Parents have in recent years become much more engaged in opposing indoctrination of their children in the educational setting, protesting the secret gender transition of students and public schools’ adoption of educational curricula that violates the family’s religious and moral values. Would the same kind of energized, grass-roots campaigns work here?

At home. Like a lot of parents, we got our children smartphones because every other child had one. Increasingly parents are saying “no.” But whether children and teens have social media access or not, parents should be talking to their children about the relationship between social media and depression, self-harm, loss of self-esteem, and even loss of identity. There are plenty of resources here, including movies such as “Can’t Look Away” and support groups such as The Parents’ Network.

Last fall, amid the murder of Charlie Kirk, I couldn’t help but grieve a bit for his killer’s parents. News stories describe a younger version of the 22-year old assassin as a good kid from a good family whose parents, by all accounts, tried to instill good values. But parents can only do so much. He graduated from high school during the Covid pandemic and lasted only a semester at college. Described by peers as being “terminally online,” at some point he was sucked into in the darker corners of online video gaming and social media such as Discord — where, by the way, the teenaged perpetrator of the 2022 Buffalo mass shooting discussed his plans for the racist attack and where Trump’s would-be assassin had an account. One has to wonder whether the isolation and the algorithms so associated with the online world contributed to that horrific killing.