There was a time when being a parent meant worrying about the things your children might encounter when they left the house. We worried about who they were with, where they were going, when they would be home and, perhaps most importantly, whether they would make sensible decisions when we weren’t there.

The internet has changed that.

Our children can now leave the house without physically going anywhere. They can enter conversations with people they have never met, encounter ideas and images that we would never have considered appropriate for their age, and find themselves exposed to advertising, misinformation and social pressures that previous generations simply did not experience in quite the same way.

The difficulty is that the internet is not inherently a bad place. Quite the opposite. It has opened up extraordinary opportunities for learning, communication, creativity and discovery. A child can explore the surface of Mars, watch a documentary from another country, learn how to play an instrument, find out how something works, communicate with a relative on the other side of the world or discover that there are other people who share an interest they thought nobody else understood.

The challenge is that all of these things exist alongside content and experiences that children may not yet have the maturity to understand or manage.

This is where I think parents sometimes find themselves in a difficult position. We want our children to benefit from the opportunities that technology provides, but we also want to protect them from its risks. We want them to become independent, but we don’t want to give them freedoms they are not ready to handle. We want to trust them, but we also know that children and young teenagers do not always have the experience to recognise when something is unsafe, manipulative or simply not what it appears to be.

There is no simple answer to this, and perhaps that is one of the reasons conversations about children and technology so often become polarised. We hear that children should not have smartphones, should not use social media, should have strict screen-time limits or should simply be allowed to work things out for themselves. Each of these positions contains some truth, but none of them, on its own, is enough.

Children need boundaries. They need age-appropriate restrictions. They need to know that there are things they should not access and people they should not engage with. They need parents who understand, at least broadly, the digital environments their children are entering. But they also need adults who are willing to talk to them about what they encounter.

A child who knows they can come to a parent and say, “Something happened online and I don’t know what to do,” is in a much safer position than a child who believes that admitting they have made a mistake will automatically result in having their phone taken away. This doesn’t mean there should be no consequences. It means that the relationship between parent and child needs to remain more important than the device.

Perhaps one of the most important things we can do is to stop thinking about internet safety as something we can solve with a single conversation. Children grow. Their access changes. Their interests change. The technology changes. The risks change. A six-year-old, a twelve-year-old and a sixteen-year-old need very different kinds of guidance.

For younger children, that may mean adults controlling access and being closely involved in what they do online. As children get older, the emphasis should gradually move towards helping them make sensible decisions themselves. This is harder. It is much easier to impose a rule than to develop judgement.

Interestingly, we are beginning to see governments and courts recognise that this responsibility cannot simply be placed on parents. In Indonesia, the government has introduced regulations aimed at protecting children in the digital environment, including restrictions on children under 16 holding accounts on designated high-risk digital platforms. The government has explicitly argued that responsibility for protecting children online cannot rest with parents alone.

And just recently, something similar has happened on a much larger scale in the United States. It was reported that Meta has agreed to a settlement with US states worth up to around $18 billion over ten years following legal claims concerning the way Facebook and Instagram were designed and their impact on young users. Meta has not admitted wrongdoing, but the agreement includes significant changes, including a default two-hour daily limit for teenagers, restrictions overnight, muted notifications during school hours, stronger age-assurance measures and other parental and safety controls.

The figure is enormous, but the more interesting part of the story, for me at least, is what it says about responsibility. For years, much of the conversation around children’s social media use has effectively amounted to, “Parents need to supervise their children better.” There is certainly some truth in that. But what happens when the environment itself has been designed to capture attention, encourage engagement and keep people coming back?

It is difficult to tell parents that they simply need to exercise more control when the companies creating these platforms have vastly more resources, information and technological expertise than any individual parent.

At the same time, regulation is not a magic solution. A two-hour limit sounds sensible, but does the problem disappear if a young person spends those two hours being fed increasingly engaging or harmful content? Stronger age verification sounds sensible too, but how do we verify someone’s age without creating new privacy problems? And if a platform is required to decide what is safe for a thirteen-, fourteen- or fifteen-year-old, who decides what “safe” actually means?

Critics of the Meta settlement have already pointed out that many of the underlying algorithmic systems remain largely intact, and that reducing the amount of time young people spend on a platform does not necessarily make the platform itself safer. That doesn’t mean the measures are pointless. Quite the opposite. I think it is a positive development that governments are beginning to recognise that digital platforms have responsibilities towards the children who use them. But it also demonstrates just how complicated this problem is.

We cannot regulate our way out of every problem, just as we cannot parent our way out of every problem.

Ultimately, our children will leave our homes. They will have phones we cannot monitor. They will have conversations we cannot hear. They will encounter people and ideas we cannot screen out for them. We therefore cannot make the goal of parenting the creation of a completely risk-free digital childhood. Our goal has to be to help children become capable of navigating risk.

That means giving them boundaries, but also giving them the knowledge and confidence to understand why those boundaries exist. It means talking to them about privacy, consent, relationships, manipulation, advertising, algorithms and the permanence of what they put online. It means helping them understand that not everything they see is true, that not everyone they meet online is who they claim to be and that the number of likes or followers something has does not tell us whether it is valuable or trustworthy.

It also means accepting that we, as adults, don’t have all the answers.

We are navigating this world too.

For those of us who remember life before the internet, it can be tempting to think that the solution is simply to return to the way things were. But there is no going back. The internet is now part of our children’s world, just as television, cars and telephones became part of previous generations’ lives.

The question is not whether we can keep children out of the digital world. It is whether we can help them grow up in it safely. And that requires more than parental controls, age restrictions and screen-time limits. It requires a relationship between children and adults based on trust, communication and gradually increasing responsibility.

Because eventually, the most important protection we can give our children is not a filter on a screen. It is the ability to make good decisions when there is nobody standing beside them.