Growing Up Online: The Challenge of Modern Parenting
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There’s no argument that Gen Z’s upbringing has been drastically different from that of any generation before it. For the first time, children are growing up with access to a device that can connect them to virtually anyone, anywhere, at any time. Because of this, parents (over the age of 25) face a challenge that previous generations never had to consider: How do you protect your child from something you never experienced yourself?
Gen Z parents have lost the ability to relate to certain aspects of their children’s lives, the most obvious being phones and social media. No modern-day parents who grew up before the rise of social media can truly know what it feels like to make plans, maintain friendships across long distances, or communicate with friends through a single text message during their developmental years. They also don’t know what it’s like to curate Instagram posts with friends, post on Snapchat stories, or constantly have an audience watching what you do.
But most importantly, they don’t know what it’s like to be given such a powerful tool at such a young age.
It’s human instinct to be hesitant toward the unknown, so parental concerns over social media are natural. Parents have watched these platforms evolve alongside their children, and they have seen both the benefits and the consequences. Social media can create communities, strengthen friendships, and give young people a space to express themselves. At the same time, it can expose them to cyberbullying, unrealistic standards, constant comparison, and an expectation to always be connected.
So how restrictive should parents be over their child’s screens without crossing the line?
For parents, it can be tempting to believe that the easiest way to protect their children is to control their access. Set a time limit. Take the phone away. Delete the app. Check their messages. Track their location. And while some of these boundaries can be healthy, there is a point where protection begins to look more like surveillance.
The difficult part of parenting in the digital age is that children eventually have to learn how to regulate their own technology use. A parent can take away a phone, but they cannot take away the internet forever. Eventually, the teenager will have their own device, their own accounts, and their own decisions to make. That raises a more important question: Is the goal to prevent children from encountering the dangers of social media, or is it to teach them how to handle those dangers when they inevitably encounter them?
There is a difference between restricting a child’s access and teaching a child how to use something responsibly.
For a young child, strict limitations may be necessary. They may not have the maturity to understand why posting a picture publicly can have consequences, why they shouldn’t share personal information, or why talking to strangers online can be dangerous. Parents have a responsibility to create boundaries when their children are not yet capable of creating them for themselves. But as children grow older, those boundaries should grow with them.
A teenager who is trusted with more freedom can learn how to make decisions, experience consequences, and develop a sense of responsibility. On the other hand, a teenager whose every message, search, and interaction is monitored may learn something entirely different: how to hide things.
This is where trust becomes an important part of the conversation. Parents shouldn’t have to choose between being completely uninvolved and knowing everything their child does online. There is a middle ground. Parents can talk to their children about what they see online without immediately judging them. They can establish rules while explaining why those rules exist. They can make it clear that if something goes wrong online, their child can come to them without automatically fearing punishment.
Because ultimately, the goal shouldn’t be to raise a child who behaves responsibly because their phone is being monitored. It should be to raise someone who can make responsible decisions when no one is watching. And perhaps that is the biggest challenge Gen Z parents face. They aren’t simply parenting children who use technology. They are parenting children whose social lives, identities, and relationships are developing alongside it.
There is no guidebook for that.
The generation before them can offer advice, establish boundaries, and provide perspective, but they cannot fully understand what it feels like to grow up in a world where your social life exists both in front of you and inside your phone. There was no childhood version of this. No parent could exactly say, “When I was your age, I had the same problem,” because they simply didn’t.
Maybe the answer, then, isn’t to keep children away from the digital world their entire childhood. Maybe it’s to teach them how to live in it.
