Kids, Tech, And A Parent’s Role In Keeping Them Safe Online (2026)

I will be honest with you. I have worried about technology since I was eight years old, and almost thirty-five years later that worry is still sitting quietly in the back of my mind. It might sound strange coming from someone whose whole life is tech, but the worry was never really about the technology itself. It was always about where it might take us, and what it might mean for the people I love.

Five years ago, when I first wrote about this, my worry had a name: artificial intelligence. Back then it still felt abstract. In 2026 it is not on the horizon any more. It is in my kids' pockets, in their homework, in the chatbots they talk to, and in some genuinely dark corners I will come to later. So I have rewritten this from the ground up, kept it honest and personal, and added the practical part I wish someone had handed me when my daughter got her first laptop at the age of five. This is for every parent in Manchester who feels that same low hum of worry and wants to do something useful with it.

The day I realised I was thinking about this all wrong

My kids are growing up in a world I never imagined. They ask the smart speaker to put the lights on, they fact-check me by asking it questions, and they stay close to their friends through online games and group chats in ways I have come to see as a real positive rather than a threat.

The moment it all shifted for me was when my daughter was given a laptop at five years old, a parting gift from my late mum. Standing there, I realised my instinct to keep my kids away from technology was old-fashioned and, frankly, pointless. I cannot shield them from something that will be woven through every part of their adult lives. My job is not to build a wall. It is to teach them to swim. The research backs this up: banning it outright tends to backfire, so the goal is to help them embrace it and stay safe.

And the scale of it is not in my head. Ofcom, the UK regulator that tracks how children use media, found that smartphone ownership leaps from 56% of ten-year-olds to 83% of eleven-year-olds, basically the moment they start secondary school, and that around a quarter of five-to-seven-year-olds already own a smartphone.

That is not cause for panic, but it is cause for paying attention.

The Online Safety Act: a higher floor, not a fix

Two enormous things have shifted since I last wrote about this, and the first is that the law caught up. The Online Safety Act is now in force, the biggest change to the landscape in a generation. Since 25 July 2025, online services that children are likely to use have had legal duties to protect them. Under rules enforced by Ofcom, platforms must use "highly effective age assurance" to keep children away from the most harmful content and to filter bullying, violent and hateful content out of the feeds pushed at young people. A simple "tick to confirm you are 18" no longer counts, and the penalties run to millions.

This is genuinely good news. But I want to be straight with you: the Act raises the floor, it does not replace you. Some children get around age checks with VPNs, and Ofcom's own research still finds that nearly three-quarters of 11-to-17-year-olds say they have seen harmful content online. So treat the law as a helpful safety net, not a reason to stop watching the trapeze. The conversation and the supervision still matter most. They always will.

AI: my old worry, made concrete

The second shift is that AI grew up fast, and it is now everywhere in my children's world, with real opportunity alongside real risk.

Chatbots and "AI companions." This is the one that has crept up fastest. Internet Matters, one of the UK's most trusted online-safety charities, found that 64% of UK children now use AI chatbots, and more than a third of those say chatting to an AI feels "like talking to a friend." Ofcom found around one in ten 8-to-17-year-olds have used AI as someone to talk to. That stops me in my tracks, because a chatbot is not a friend. It does not know your child, it can confidently tell them things that are flat wrong, and it cannot replace a human who actually cares. It is worth talking to your child about AI directly.

Deepfakes and AI-generated images. The darker side is grim, and I will keep it brief but I will not dodge it. The Internet Watch Foundation, the UK body that finds and removes child sexual abuse material, reported that AI-generated abuse videos exploded from 13 in 2024 to over 3,400 in 2025. The Government has moved to ban AI "nudification" apps and criminalise the models built to produce this material. I mention it because awareness is protection: your child should know images can be faked, that this is a crime, and that if anything like it touches their life they can come straight to you and the authorities without a moment's shame.

Homework and misinformation. On the lighter end, my kids reach for AI to help with schoolwork. I do not ban it. I treat it like a calculator: a tool for understanding, not for doing it for you. Our house rule is simple: use it to learn a concept, never to hand in something you did not write, and always check what it tells you, because AI gets things wrong with total confidence.

Naming the real risks honestly

Vague fear does not help anyone, but accurate understanding does. Here are the risks that genuinely matter:

• Online grooming. The person on the other end of a screen might not be who they say they are, and anyone who asks a child to keep a secret is not to be trusted. That single rule, no secrets from mum and dad ever, is one of the strongest protections there is.
• Sextortion. This barely registered in 2021 and is now a major threat, particularly to teenage boys aged around 15 to 17. Criminals trick a young person into sharing an intimate image, then threaten to share it unless they pay. The NCA found that 74% of boys they asked did not really understand what sextortion even was. The message every teenager needs before it happens: it is never your fault, do not pay, keep the evidence, and tell a trusted adult immediately. Shame is the criminal's weapon, so take it away. (If you have had one of these yourself, our guide to password and sextortion email scams covers the adult version too.)
• Cyberbullying. The playground now follows children home through their phones, relentless in a way ours never was, because there is no front door to close behind it.
• Harmful and age-inappropriate content. Despite the new laws, children still stumble across things they are not ready for.
• Scams and "bad marketing." This includes in-game purchases and loot boxes engineered to part children from money using the same tricks as gambling. Turn off in-app purchases, never save your card to a child's account, and set up spending PINs.
• Misinformation, now turbocharged by AI. It is harder than ever for a child, or an adult, to tell what is real.
• Balance and wellbeing. The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health takes the sensible view that there is no single magic number of safe screen-time hours. What matters is whether screens are crowding out sleep, exercise, friends and family time. Judge the balance, not the clock.

Pillar one: talk to them, often and without judgement

If you do nothing else, do this. The single most protective thing in a child's online life is not a piece of software. It is knowing they can come to you when something goes wrong. A few things I have learned, some the hard way:

• Make it little and often, not one big "tech talk." A hundred small, casual chats while driving to football land far better than a scary one-off lecture.
• Be curious, not critical. Ask them to show you the games and apps they love. Kids open up when they are the expert.
• Never punish them for telling you something bad happened online. If a child fears losing their phone for confessing that something frightened them, they will simply stop telling you, and that silence is exactly what predators and bullies rely on. The line I use is: "If anything online ever worries you, you can always tell me, and you will never be in trouble for it." Mean it, and prove it.
• Agree the rules together. A family agreement works far better than a list stuck on the fridge. Childnet has free templates for this, and Thinkuknow is excellent for age-by-age advice.
• Name other trusted adults, and make sure they know about Childline (0800 1111) for anything they cannot bring to you.

Pillar two: set up the technical safeguards

Conversation is the foundation, but you can stack the deck in your favour with free tools already on your devices. The key thing most people miss is that controls need setting up in more than one place, because each covers different gaps:

• On the device: Google Family Link (Android), Apple Screen Time and Family Sharing (iPhone/iPad), and Microsoft Family Safety (Windows and Xbox), for screen limits, app approvals and content filtering.
• On consoles: Xbox Family Settings, Nintendo Switch Parental Controls and PlayStation family management. If your child games, set these up.
• On your broadband: BT, Sky Broadband Shield, Virgin Media, TalkTalk and the mobile networks all offer free network-level filtering that covers every device in the house at once.

Internet Matters has genuinely excellent step-by-step guides for every one of these. And if setting it all up feels like a faff, it is exactly the kind of thing I sort for Manchester families every week.

Pillar three: know where to report

If something does go wrong, knowing exactly where to turn, quickly and calmly, makes all the difference. Keep these somewhere handy:

If you are worried about...	Where to report or who to contact
Grooming or online sexual abuse	CEOP Safety Centre (run by the National Crime Agency)
A nude or sexual image of an under-18 being shared	Report Remove (Childline and IWF), free and confidential, can get images taken down
Any worry at all, for the child themselves	Childline, 0800 1111
Bullying or harmful content on a platform	The platform's in-app reporting tools (improved under the new law)
A worried adult who needs to talk it through	NSPCC Helpline, 0808 800 5000

The bigger picture: we did this before, and we got through it

For all the serious stuff above, I am not actually a pessimist about it. Our kids need their screen time the way we needed our outdoor time as children, and the risks are not as different as we like to tell ourselves. Our parents taught us about the dangers of talking to strangers, of going off with people we did not know, of keeping secrets from the grown-ups who loved us. The job now is the same job, it just needs a modern translation. The stranger at the park gate is now a message request. The secret an adult asks a child to keep is now a private chat. The principles have not changed at all.

So no, I cannot keep my kids away from the virtual world, and I have stopped wanting to. What I can do is far more powerful: educate them, talk with them honestly and often, set up sensible guardrails, and make sure they know that whatever happens out there, home is the safe place they can always come back to.

Where Manchester PC can help

A lot of this you can do yourself in an afternoon. But if you would rather it was done properly so you can get on with life, that is what I am here for. I help parents across Greater Manchester set up parental controls, lock down family PCs and tablets, and get the kids' devices running safely and smoothly, and I am happy to advise on the wider family tech setup too. No jargon, no upselling, and an honest quote before any work begins. If you would like a hand getting your family set up safely, get a free, no-obligation quote or call us on 0161 820 1992.