There is a phrase that those of us from Generation X should probably be banned from using: “It wasn’t like this in my day.” It usually comes with a story about walking five miles to school in the snow, although somehow most of us grew up in places where it rarely snowed. We talk about having to remember telephone numbers, waiting for a television programme to come on at a particular time, looking something up in an encyclopaedia or going to somebody’s house because there was no messaging app to tell us where they were. We survived without smartphones, apparently, and are very keen to remind younger people of this fact.

I am guilty of some of this nostalgia, although I don’t actually think the world was better simply because it did not have smartphones. I grew up in a different world from the one I occupy now, and I don’t think one is automatically better than the other. There is something useful, however, about having experienced life both before and after the internet became part of everyday life. Those of us who remember a largely offline childhood have a reference point that today’s children simply do not have. We remember when being online was something we deliberately chose to do.

For a child growing up today, that distinction may not exist. The digital world is not something that was added to their childhood. It has been there from the beginning. Their school may use digital platforms. Their friends communicate through messaging apps. Entertainment is streamed rather than scheduled. Information is searched rather than retrieved from a shelf. Family photographs are stored online. Sport, music, news and events are available whenever they want them. Increasingly, artificial intelligence is becoming part of the tools they use to learn, create and communicate.

Telling children to “get off the internet” can therefore be a rather useless piece of advice. For many of them, the internet is not a separate place. The question is not whether children should be online. They will be. The more important question is what kind of relationship we want them to have with the digital world.

This is where I think our conversations about children’s technology use sometimes become too focused on time. How many hours are they spending on a device? How long have they been playing a game? How much time have they spent on social media? These questions matter, but time alone does not tell us very much.

An hour spent researching something a child is fascinated by is not the same as an hour spent endlessly scrolling through short videos. An hour talking to a grandparent who lives on the other side of the world is not the same as an hour comparing yourself with strangers online. An hour watching a sporting event with friends is different from an hour being pulled from one piece of content to another by an algorithm. The device and the time spent may be the same. The experience is not.

This is why I think the more useful question is not simply, “How much time are children spending online?” but “What are they doing there, and are they choosing to do it?”

For much of my own adult life, I have thought of the internet primarily as a tool. I go online because I want to find something out. I might be researching a subject, looking for people who share an interest, supporting somebody doing something positive, watching a sporting event, following an issue I care about or keeping in touch with friends and family who live somewhere else. Sometimes I am there simply because I want to be entertained. The point is that I generally have a reason for going online.

That is not necessarily how the internet is experienced by someone who has grown up with it. For many young people, being online is not an activity that begins with a conscious decision to go somewhere. It is simply part of the background of everyday life. A phone is always nearby. Notifications arrive without being requested. Friends are communicating. Content is constantly available. Algorithms are selecting what might be interesting next.

There is therefore a subtle but important difference between using technology and being directed by it. The former requires agency; the latter can happen without us noticing.

This is one of the reasons that our children need to understand how the digital environment works. The internet they encounter is not simply a giant library waiting for them to search it. Much of what they see has been selected for them. Platforms learn what captures their attention and use that information to decide what to show them next. This can be useful. It can help us find people with shared interests, discover information we would otherwise miss or connect with communities that matter to us. But it can also create very narrow digital environments in which we increasingly see things that confirm what we already believe, make us angry or simply keep us watching.

Children therefore need to learn not only how to use digital tools, but how to recognise when those tools are manipulating their attention.

That is a different kind of digital literacy.

It is also why I am wary of making this conversation entirely about restricting technology. Of course, boundaries matter, particularly for younger children, and the previous two blogs have explored some of the reasons why. But as children grow, we cannot reasonably expect the solution to remain a set of increasingly complicated rules about when and what they can and cannot look at on a screen.

At some point, the goal has to be independence. We need to help children develop the ability to make good decisions when an adult is not standing next to them. That means helping them recognise why they are using technology and how it makes them feel. Are they using it because they have chosen to do something, or because they are bored and automatically reaching for a device? Are they enjoying what they are doing, or have they simply continued because the next thing appeared? Are they connecting with somebody, learning something or creating something, or are they consuming content without really knowing why?

These are not questions that children will answer perfectly. Let’s be honest, neither will adults.

And perhaps this is where those of us who grew up before smartphones need to be a little more humble. We can remember a time when there was no algorithm deciding what appeared on our screen, but that does not mean we were masters of our attention. We had television advertising, newspapers, celebrity culture, gossip, propaganda and plenty of other ways of wasting time. They just weren’t all immediately present on a single device in our pockets.

The difference today is the scale, speed and personalisation of the digital environment, and our children are going to need to navigate that environment in ways we never had to.

So perhaps the aim should not be to raise children who are afraid of technology, or children who think that being online is inherently unhealthy. Nor should we try to recreate the childhood we had. That childhood has gone, and there is little point in endlessly sermonising about it.

Instead, we should help children develop a sense of purpose and choice. The internet can be an extraordinary place for learning. A child interested in astronomy can explore images from space agencies around the world. A student fascinated by history can access archives that would once have been available only to researchers. Someone learning an instrument can find lessons, performances and communities of musicians. Young people can connect with others who share interests that might not be represented in their immediate surroundings. They can support causes, discover different perspectives, communicate with people they care about and participate in events taking place thousands of kilometres away.

There is enormous value in that, and it is something we should be careful not to lose sight of when we talk about digital risks.

The challenge is not to keep children away from the digital world. It is to make sure that the digital world does not become the only world they inhabit. Children still need the physical world: conversations around a table, friendships that are not mediated by a screen, time outside, boredom, movement, practical experiences, making things with their hands and the opportunity to be somewhere without documenting it. They also need to experience the increasingly valuable feeling of having nothing demanding their attention. Why? Because being bored often pushes a child towards creativity and invention; in other words, it gives them the opportunity to be innovative and engaged on their own terms.

That balance will look different for every child and change as they grow. A six-year-old needs very different boundaries from a sixteen-year-old. The goal should therefore be developmental rather than simply restrictive: as children become older and more capable, they should gradually gain more freedom because they have developed the judgement to use it responsibly.

This brings us back to the purpose of this series. We began by considering how we protect children in a digital world. We then looked at why they need critical thinking to make sense of the information they encounter. Finally, we come to something that perhaps matters most in the long term: agency.

For those of us who remember life before the internet, the idea of using it as a tool may seem completely natural. I go online because I want to research something, find people with similar interests, support positive causes, watch sport, keep in touch with family or simply entertain myself. I don’t feel that I need to be present online in order to validate myself.

But that may be a difficult concept for someone who has grown up in a world where the digital and physical are so closely intertwined.

They may have to learn that being connected does not mean being constantly available. That having access to everything does not mean everything deserves their attention. That seeing something does not make it important. That being present online is not the same as having a meaningful life.

And maybe that is the real challenge of growing up in a digital world. Not learning how to escape it, and certainly not learning to fear it, but learning how to live in it deliberately.

We cannot give children the childhood we had. Nor, if we are honest, should we necessarily want to. Every generation grows up in a different world, and our job is not to make the next generation recreate ours.

Our job is to help them develop the judgement, curiosity and agency they need to make their own way through the world they have inherited.

Perhaps that is what being digitally literate really means: not simply knowing how to use the technology, but rather knowing when to use it, why to use it, when to question what it shows us, and when to put it down.

Ultimately, the goal is not to raise children who know how to live online, it is to raise children who know how to live well in a world that happens to be online too.