Some parents are even building their own solutions. Frustrated by available offerings, Callaghan, the Australian dad, created a web-based tool called Joey Family. The idea is not to catch his son doing something wrong but to answer a simple question: “Is he happy?” He wanted to know if his kid was lonely, whether he sent more messages than he got back. The data opened conversations. “The people I’m trying to help are people like me who want to have that relationship with their kids,” Callaghan told me. “They want to be guides and learners.”
If anything is fundamental, it’s the relationship: Online safety efforts work best when anchored by a young person’s trust in someone else. For kids whose homes aren’t safe—like M., or Wisniewski when she was young—that someone can even be an online community. “There are so many ways where we can find real community online,” says Caitlyn Vergara, a child-safety researcher at Harvard who studies youth mental health. “Especially for youth of color coming from majority-white spaces, it is a legitimate way to find community when community is not tangible around you.” Walling off kids in the name of safety can isolate them, she says; the point is to make sure every kid has somewhere safe to belong.
The core tension is that families are being asked to solve at the kitchen table a problem engineered in boardrooms. Monitoring is one answer to that assignment, but while it might mitigate risks from outside the home, it can also damage the trust inside it. The best parents can do is refuse to become one more thing their kids have to hide from—and stop believing they should have to fix a dangerous situation alone.
