Public debate about children’s digital lives often falls into two discourses of blame. One insists platforms must do more to protect children, underpinning the Online Safety Act 2023. The other quickly follows: parents need to take more responsibility. Whether the concern is pornography, harmful sexual behaviour, influencer culture or mental health, parents are cast as the first and last line of defence. The subtext is clear: if harm occurs online, parents must have been too permissive, inattentive or out of touch.
This instinct is understandable. Parenting is intimate and visible, and in moments of anxiety people seek simple points of accountability. Yet blaming parents obscures a more complicated reality. We can all be strict about screentime until the torture of a three-hour road trip sets in. Digital life is woven into childhood in ways no previous generation of parents has faced. Raising children today is less about controlling devices than navigating shifting ecosystems of relationships, infrastructures and cultural narratives — often while juggling contradictory pressures from schools, governments, tech companies and other (grand)parents.
Parents we’ve spoken to describe the pressure to be both knowledgeable and calm, to maintain dialogue while feeling perpetually “one step behind” fast-paced technological change and judged no matter what they do. Emily’s recent research with parents in England (Das et al., University of Surrey) found many feel disempowered: hemmed in by the scale and pace of technological change, unclear policy guidance and a continuous discourse of moral panics as media narratives amplify fear without offering much in the way of solutions. Rarely too do we hear the good news stories of how digital devices enrich children’s lives.
As part of our blog series exploring recent UK developments on children and the digital world, in this blog we examine how our safe uncertainty framework offers parents a way forward that moves beyond blame and binary thinking. We have previously written about ‘phone-free’ childhoods and social media bans – look out for our next blog that offers a deeper dive into issues around age verification.
Why is parenting and digital life so complex?
Emily and colleague’s research with parents showed they rarely think in neat categories of ‘online’ versus ‘offline’ risk. Many begin with the idea that online life is uniquely dangerous, but everyday experiences blur those lines. Conflicts that start on WhatsApp spill into the playground; pornography discovered online is made sense of in peer conversations offline. Paradoxically, parents often give their child a phone for safety as they move to secondary school, only to find it becomes a site of both protection and risk. This also reflects shifting assumptions about parenting itself. Giving a child a phone ‘for safety’ reveals contemporary expectations that parents should always know where their child is and be instantly reachable — a stark contrast with previous generations’ greater tolerance of unmonitored independence. Such expectations speak to broader cultural anxieties about risk and responsibility, intensifying the pressure on parents.
Parents repeatedly highlight the impossibility of separating digital from social life: “If I take their phone away, I’m not just stopping scrolling — I’m cutting them off from their friends, their plans, their whole social world.” This is not an argument for unlimited access, but recognition that devices are deeply embedded in how young people sustain relationships, learn and organise their lives. It is rarely as simple as just ‘taking it away’.
Policy discourse often fails to reflect this complexity, instead relying on binaries — safe/unsafe, online/offline, real/virtual — and favouring top-down solutions easier to legislate than to live. For parents in the University of Surrey study, digital risk is inseparable from broader social change: the erosion of public space, economic pressures the decline of community infrastructure and the intensification of parenting norms that demand an often-impossible balance of care and control. As one parent put it: “It’s not just the phone — it’s the fact there’s nowhere safe for them to go, nothing free for them to do.”
The limits of ‘just be stricter’
Professionals in schools and safeguarding roles often wish parents would be ‘stricter’: limiting screen time, monitoring activity, enforcing bans. Such advice is usually well-intentioned, rooted in concern about harmful content or behaviour. However, while we don’t dispute that it would reduce the spill-over of online conflicts into school, it risks oversimplifying the problem.
Police and teachers in our harmful sexual behaviour (HSB) research often expressed frustration, blaming parents for giving children ‘unfettered access’ to devices and undermining school or police messages. We heard comments such as: “The responsibility falls onto parents… a lot of parents don’t know”, or “It can be very hard… to take that phone away… but sometimes they should.” Yet these same professionals also admitted they feel lost, unable to keep pace with online trends or manage behaviours effectively.
This framing assumes knowledge is the missing ingredient. But research with girls navigating influencer culture conducted by Emily with Robyn Muir found that protective or moralistic interventions often backfire. Girls described adults who trivialised their digital worlds, over-reacted to isolated incidents or defaulted to blanket rules without grasping nuance. As one put it: “I try to ask my mum for help [about body image pressures online]… but she was like, ‘Oh, don’t be silly. You look beautiful.’ But it doesn’t really do anything to help. I know they’re trying but it doesn’t really change anything for me.”
Similarly, Emily’s research with feminist mothers about sex education in the home showed how parents aspiring to open, empowering conversations often reverted to protectionist strategies when faced with digital risks: “…be prepared for the possible worst-case scenario… those images [shared privately in an intimate relationship] possibly ending up on social media…” This framing sat uneasily alongside the mothers’ commitment to challenge shame in non-digital areas of their children’s intimate and relational lives.
Being stricter is not inherently wrong — boundaries matter — but over-reliance on restriction can erode trust, encourage concealment and shut down the very conversations that are most protective.
Adults also display cognitive dissonance: both young people and parents complain about the same online behaviours in each other, whether that be constant scrolling, digital distraction or falling prey to ideological echo chambers. Young people resent so-called ‘sharenting’ – where parents post images of them online often before they are old enough to understand or consent – especially given the repeated refrains they hear from adults about not sharing personal content online (which would include images). Indeed, France brought in new legislation in 2024 to protect children’s rights online through regulating sharenting after finding that by the age 13, most children have over 1300 images of them posted on social media without their permission, with suggestions that half of all images exchanged on child exploitation forums were originally posted with innocent intentions by the child’s parents.
What are parents already doing?
Many parents are far from passive in the face of digital challenges. Across our studies we find a strong preference for relational scaffolding: strategies grounded in conversation, trust and shared meaning-making. These practices often go unseen in public debate, which focuses on the absence of control rather than the presence of connection. Yet they are crucial for building the resilience, judgement and critical literacy young people need to navigate a complex digital environment.
There is also a need for reflexivity: for parents to examine how their own assumptions, biases and fears shape decisions. Digital technologies often become lightning rods for wider anxieties about shifting peer cultures or the loss of public space. Over-attributing every challenge to technology obscures the bigger picture and creates artificial divides between digital and non-digital childhoods. Bullying, misogyny and harassment have always existed; the difference now is that screenshots and videos make them visible and harder to ignore. Likewise, body image concerns long predate Instagram — we debated beauty magazines, adverts and airbrushing decades before social media. These are enduring social issues, amplified by algorithms but not unique to the digital realm.
Parents’ own online practices also matter. Role-modelling respectful and consistent behaviour is crucial, yet many common strategies risk perpetuating double standards. Sharenting, for example, undermines the messages young people receive about autonomy, privacy and consent: adults tell them to be cautious about sharing personal content, yet thousands of images are posted of them before they are old enough to understand or consent. Likewise, parents often view tracking and monitoring as protective, but young people learn in relationships education that such behaviours in intimate contexts can be coercive and abusive. We are not equating the two, but these tensions highlight the importance of reflexive parent-child dialogue rather than top-down imposition.
Equally, we should resist the illusion that everything online is harmful. For many young people, phones provide connection, creativity and a lifeline against isolation, particularly for marginalised groups. During COVID, the online world sustained work, learning and relationships. Many young people are more likely to access support services online than offline. Phones can therefore be protective, not just risky.
At the same time, reliance on online spaces for support and connection raises difficult questions. Vulnerable young people may find affirmation and solidarity online, but they may also encounter risk in some spaces or perhaps even further isolation if offline sources of care and connection are lacking. This underlines the need for critical reflection on why young people retreat online, and for nuanced responses that go beyond bans or crackdowns to address the structural and relational conditions shaping vulnerability.
Reflexivity means noticing when instinctive responses — dismissing, panicking, restricting — close down dialogue. An open, dialogic stance allows young people to share how they experience their digital worlds and to negotiate boundaries and opportunities together.
Introducing safe uncertainty for parenting
The safe uncertainty framework offers a way to think about parenting in the digital age that resists both paralysis and overconfidence. It maps the dimensions of safe/unsafe and certainty/uncertainty into four quadrants:
- Safe certainty: confidence in clear, fixed rules (e.g. “No devices in the bedroom ever”).
- Unsafe certainty: overconfidence in singular solutions that ignore complexity (e.g. “If I block all social media, nothing bad can happen”).
- Unsafe uncertainty: drifting without direction or boundaries.
- Safe uncertainty: willingness to explore, reflect and adapt, while maintaining safety and trust.
Most parents we speak to are seeking safe uncertainty, even if they lack the language. They want to be open to their child’s perspectives, adjust rules as they learn and stay responsive to context — while also knowing where to draw the line. By contrast, government policy tends towards safe certainty, emphasising blocking, banning and filtering. These well-intentioned measures often generate unsafe certainty: young people avoid speaking to adults for fear of punishment and end up in riskier spaces when they try to bypass safeguards. We will explore this further in a future blog on age verification.
In practice, safe uncertainty might sound like: “I’m not sure I have all the answers, but let’s look at it together and figure out what works.” It means being curious rather than assuming, and revisiting decisions as circumstances change.
Above all, young people say they want adults to listen. Not intervene, not solve, but listen with empathy. Safe uncertainty recognises that parenting is not only about decisions, but about ongoing, dialogic processes that help young people reflect on their experiences and how these intersect with relationships, wellbeing and everyday life. Parents need not always provide solutions — indeed, offering them too quickly often provokes resistance. The act of listening and exploring together can itself be protective and empowering.
What does this look like in practice?
Our research highlights scenarios where safe uncertainty supports constructive responses:
- Pornography consumption: A parent discovers their teenager has watched pornography. Instead of confiscating the device or imposing surveillance, they ask — without shame — what the young person saw, how it made them feel, and whether they have questions. This opens dialogue about consent, fantasy and media representation, avoiding punishment or shame that would undermine long-term safety.
- Influencer culture: A parent notices their child following an influencer with heavily filtered content. Rather than dismissing it as ‘fake’, they ask what appeals, how the content is produced and how it compares to real life. Drawing on their own experiences of beauty magazines or airbrushing, for example, they can give space for reflection and encourage thoughtful choices. See Emily and Robyn’s recommendations here on addressing influencer culture with children.
- Navigating online content: Parents can help children develop curiosity, critical thinking and reflective skills rather than framing ideas they may encounter online as simply ‘true’ or ‘false’. Online content is often designed to provoke emotional responses and polarise debate; what people share may be selective, framing events in narrow ways. A viral video might show only the most dramatic moments, or a meme reduce a complex issue to a slogan. These dynamics reinforce wider problems such as misogyny, racism and political polarisation. Safe uncertainty encourages young people to pause, ask what’s missing and consider why content is presented as it is, fostering curiosity rather than cynicism or blind acceptance.
- School policy pressure: A school urges parents to remove smartphones from younger children. Instead of simply complying or resisting, a parent engages with the school, shares their child’s needs and explores shared goals — such as reducing distraction or increasing physical play. They then explain the agreed approach to their child, framing it as a shared commitment and involving them in setting expectations.
Implications for educators and policymakers
If parents are to operate from a place of safe uncertainty, we must stop making it harder for them. Narratives that outsource responsibility entirely to families, or equate ‘good’ parenting with restriction alone, are unhelpful.
Schools can model safe uncertainty by involving parents in digital policy discussions, offering workshops focused on relational strategies rather than just technical controls, and recognising diverse family contexts. Policymakers can support this by designing frameworks that foreground trust between families, educators and young people, rather than relying solely on punitive regulation.
Holding space for uncertainty
Parenting will always involve moments where uncertainty feels uncomfortable, especially in the fast-moving world of digital technology. But uncertainty is not the enemy. Managed well, it creates space for learning, trust-building and growth.
The safe uncertainty framework reminds us that the goal is not to eliminate uncertainty but to make it safe: creating conditions where children can explore, make mistakes and develop resilience, knowing they can turn to adults without fear of overreaction.
One practical strategy is an ‘amnesty’ policy. Many young people tell us they fear parental punishment more than online harm, leaving them to manage worries alone. An amnesty means telling them: If you see, experience or do something online that upsets you, tell me and you won’t be in trouble. Parents must live by this promise, even if the child was in spaces they shouldn’t have been. Once the dust has settled, boundaries can be addressed, but a child should never be punished for asking for help.
When we move beyond blame, bans and quick fixes, we open the way to more honest, collaborative parenting. This approach recognises complexity, honours the relational work parents already do, and gives parents, educators and policymakers a shared role in supporting children’s flourishing.
For those interested in the safe uncertainty approach, we are developing reflective and discussion exercises for parents to use at home, designed to complement our school resources. These will help parents open constructive conversations about digital life, relationships and wellbeing. We also recommend keeping an eye out for our forthcoming Safe Uncertainty book, which explores this framework in depth and offers practical guidance for applying it at home, in schools and in policy.