Let’s Just Blame The Parents

Every single time I read or write about what the internet is doing to boys (and girls): the algorithm, the pornography, a girl raped by boys who were taught she was a thing. And within about four comments, there it is, regular as clockwork.

"Parents shouldn't give their kids phones." "It's the parents' job to monitor it." "Bad parenting. Simple."

No. It’s not as simple as “let’s just blame the parents”. And here’s why…

So picture the off-licence on the corner. We don’t say "just don't let your kid drink" and then blame the parents when a shop sells a twelve year old a bottle of vodka. The shop broke the law. The law has the parent's back. That is how it works for every single thing we know harms children. You have to be eighteen to buy alcohol, cigarettes, fireworks or a knife. Eighteen to gamble. Seventeen to drive. [1] We draw a line, we write it into law, and the law backs the parents up.

Social media is the one shop with no line and no law. Open all hours. Selling harm to children, for free, with nobody stopping it. And somehow we have decided that one is the parent's problem to fix on their own.

It was never about the phone anyway. A phone for calls and maps and texting your mates is fine. It is necessary now. Around 96% of adults in this country own a smartphone. [2] By the time kids start secondary school, nearly all of them have one too. [3] School is online. Homework is online. Friendships live on it. Safety lives on it, the location sharing, the being able to ring your child on the way home. You cannot lock a kid out of the entire modern world until the day they turn eighteen, then hand them a smartphone cold and expect them to swim.

Because that is not how growing up works, with anything. The whole point of the teenage years is the slow handover, from a child who has everything done for them into an adult who can stand on their own. We do not flick that switch on their eighteenth birthday. We teach it in pieces. How to do their own washing. How to get the train into town without us. How to handle a bit of money, a bit of freedom, a bit of risk, a little more each year. Independence is a dimmer switch, not an on off button.

So why would the most powerful technology ever built be the one thing we hand over all at once, full beam, the day we finally cave? The phone is just the vehicle. What rides on it can be added slowly, the same as everything else. Calls and maps at eleven. Social media much later, when the brain on the other end is better built to take it. No social media until sixteen is not a mad idea. It is just letting them grow into it, the way they grow into all of it.

The phone is not the poison. What’s behind the glass is. The unregulated algorithm that takes twenty three minutes to start feeding a thirteen year old boy woman-hating filth he never went looking for. [4]

And anyone who thinks this is simple to control is usually picturing a seven year old. When they are small, you can hold the whole thing in your hand. What they watch, when, for how long. Then secondary school comes, and the independence that has to come with it, and the walls drop fast. That is the precise moment it turns dangerous, and the precise moment a parent's grip shrinks. Telling a teenager to just use it a little bit is like handing a kid heroin and saying go steady. They can’t. It’s built so they cannot. That is the entire point of it.

It was never a fair fight, either. A mum with a screen time app, against a machine built by thousands of the cleverest engineers on earth, paid billions to make the thing impossible to put down. [5] We know it is built that way, because courtrooms are finally starting to say so out loud. [5] Pretending a parent can win that with a bedtime rule lets the people who built the machine stroll off whistling.

Which is exactly what they want. "It's the parents' fault" is the most useful sentence the tech giants ever heard. It keeps the heat off them. It turns a billion pound design choice into your personal failing as a mother. Oldest trick there is. Blame the individual, never the system.

And it lands hardest on the families with the least. Single parents. Parents working two jobs, working nights to pay the rent. You can’t hover over a screen 24 hours a day when you are not even in the room. The most exposed kids are not the least loved. They are the least supervised, and that is a money problem, not a love problem. So "just parent better" punishes the parents who already have the least room to.

"You shouldn't have given him a phone." "She shouldn't have worn that." "She shouldn't have walked home on her own." "She shouldn't have had that much to drink." Always, always the person trying to cope who gets the blame. Never the thing doing the harm. We are so well trained to blame the victim that we now do it to children and call it common sense.

I’m not against limits. God, no. I have locked my own two down to nothing, no social media, no WhatsApp. But me doing that in my own house does not fix this, any more than one mum locking the drinks cabinet ever fixed underage drinking. We did not fix that with willpower and good intentions. We fixed it with law.

And the law is finally starting to move here too. A new act passed in April that lets the government force restrictions on these platforms for under sixteens. [6] Pornography sites have had to actually check ages since last July, and traffic to the biggest one halved almost overnight, which tells you it was always possible, they just were never made to. [7] This week the Prime Minister gave the tech giants three months to stop children being sent explicit images or face new laws. [6] Bare minimum. Years too late. But it is the right target at last. The dealer, not the mum.

So treat it like the drug it is. Put the line in law. Back the parents up. Go after the people getting rich on the harm.

It was never the mum's fault. It was the machine, and the men who built it, and the lawmakers who let them get away with it for twenty years. Blame them. Then make them fix it.

The receipts

1. UK legal minimum ages: 18 to buy alcohol, cigarettes, fireworks and knives, and to gamble; 17 to drive a car: UK government (gov.uk); the minimum age to play the National Lottery was raised to 18 in 2021.

2. Around 96% of UK adults owning a smartphone: Bryter, nationally representative survey of 2,117 UK adults, 2026, consistent with Ofcom, Online Nation, December 2025.

3. Smartphone ownership among children rising steeply with age, with the majority owning one by age 10 and near-universal ownership by the start of secondary school: Ofcom, Children and Parents: Media Use and Attitudes, 2024 to 2025.

4. A blank account set up as a 13 year old boy being served toxic content by the algorithm in roughly 23 minutes: Dublin City University Anti-Bullying Centre, "Recommending Toxicity," 2024 (reported by Euronews, 23 April 2024).

5. Social media platforms being designed to maximise the time users spend on them, and US courts beginning to hold them to account, including a New Mexico jury finding Meta liable for endangering children (March 2026) and a jury verdict against Meta and YouTube over platform design (25 March 2026), with over 2,500 related cases pending: PBS NewsHour, March 2026; Social Media Victims Law Center; Motley Rice, 2026.

6. The Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act receiving Royal Assent on 29 April 2026, giving the government power to restrict under-16s' social media use and making the school phone ban statutory, and the Prime Minister telling technology firms at London Tech Week they have three months to stop children being sent and shown explicit images or face new laws: House of Commons Library; ITV News and BBC News, 8 June 2026.

7. Pornography sites being required to verify users' ages under the Online Safety Act from 25 July 2025, after which UK traffic to the largest site fell by around 47%: Ofcom; Similarweb, August 2025.