Disclaimer: This essay was planned and written in collaboration with ChatGPT 4o.
My intention is for the following to be a sympathetic musing from the outside on what seems like a tough dynamic. I am neither a parent, nor have I been a child in a long time, but I am sympathetic to both in our current era of all-pervading digitality.
The conversation about children and technology tends to return to familiar grooves: screen time, TikTok brain, online safety. The prevailing concern is one of damage control—how to mitigate the harms of devices that children seem too eager to adopt.
But something else is happening, more subtle and far-reaching. It’s not just that children are growing up in a digital world; it’s that they—and their parents—are being shaped by it in parallel. This isn’t a matter of isolated “bad habits” or poor parenting decisions. It’s about what happens to attention, emotion, memory, and authority when daily life is fully embedded in digital infrastructures. To understand what parenting means today, we have to stop looking only at the child holding the phone—and look also at the adult holding their own.
We live in a post-digital age. This doesn’t mean digital technology is behind us—it means it’s everywhere, woven into the texture of everyday life. The digital is no longer a tool we pick up or put down; it is the environment in which we think, remember, relate, and care.
The philosopher Bernard Stiegler offers a helpful framework for thinking about this. For him, technology is not just external or supplementary. It’s part of what constitutes us. Tools shape perception, memory, and time. A child playing on an iPad is not “using” a device from outside. Their sense of agency, rhythm, and attention is being formed through that medium. They are a subject within it.
And so are their parents. Adult life—work, social life, romantic life, domestic management—is equally entangled with screens, apps, and platforms. The parent watching their child scroll TikTok may be doing so while toggling between work emails, news alerts, and their own social feeds. Parenting in this context is not a matter of stepping outside to supervise from a safe remove. It is a matter of being inside, trying to stay oriented in a shifting, immersive landscape.
Culturally, we still cling to the image of the parent as steward: a stable adult presence who guides a child through a dangerous world. This image is hard to reconcile with the post-digital condition. The parent is not outside the system, but inside it—being shaped, distracted, and disoriented by the same forces that are shaping their child.
This contradiction emerges clearly in an essay by Kristin Lewis, published in Business Insider, where she describes how her seven-year-old son engaged in a conversation through his iPad with someone he believed to be his cousin. The child was drawn into a real-time chat with a stranger who asked for help “buying something,” and—thinking he was helping his cousin—he completed an in-app purchase. The situation was disorienting not only because the child bypassed rules or safety mechanisms Lewis had put in place, but because the entire interaction occurred within a logic of communication and sociality that the adult had not anticipated.
Lewis’s reaction is telling. She admits she had no idea such a chat function even existed in the game. She wasn’t being careless—she was outpaced. Her assumptions about parental oversight no longer matched the texture of her child’s digital experience. What looks like a loss of control is, in fact, a sign that the frame itself is obsolete. The parent is no longer the gatekeeper but a participant in a rapidly evolving system—one whose logic often exceeds adult comprehension.
This isn’t about authority being undermined by disobedience. It’s about authority being destabilised by the structure of the environment itself. Parents don’t fail because they’re inattentive; they struggle because they are embedded in a world where they are no longer sovereign.
Parents today are not simply managing the effects of digital media on their children—they are enduring those effects themselves. The conditions that shape the child's subjectivity—fragmented attention, social comparison, algorithmic influence—also shape the adult’s. These are not parallel processes. they’re entangled.
Kylie Kelce, in a recent podcast interview, voiced something many parents believe but rarely pronounce: “Every mom is just winging it.” She described the complexity of trying to parent in an environment that changes faster than she can interpret it. Decisions that once seemed minor—what kind of video to allow at snack time, for instance—now feel burdened with unseen consequences.
This sense of improvisation isn’t just about uncertainty. It reflects a deeper transformation in adult life. Focus is harder to sustain. Time feels more compressed. Emotional availability is strained by ambient connectivity. Parenting happens in the midst of interruptions—notifications, work emails, breaking news, curated comparisons of other people’s parenting lives. The self that shows up to care is often distracted, depleted, and uncertain.
Stiegler would call this a “short-circuiting” of intergenerational transmission. What used to be passed down—habits of attention, stories, modes of emotional regulation—is now intercepted by faster, more immediate sources of influence: YouTube channels, algorithmic feeds, commercial platforms. Parents still care deeply. But the conditions of that care have changed. The rhythms that once defined family life have given way to something more volatile and mediated.
The standard framing of technology and children often hinges on questions of control: how to set limits, enforce boundaries, protect innocence. But these questions rest on an outdated picture of the adult as fully-formed, and of the child as simply in need of guidance. The more pressing question today is how both are being reshaped—how parenting itself has become a site of uncertain affect and ethical improvisation.
To care for someone in the post-digital context is to do so while navigating frayed attention, ambient anxiety, and a collapse of boundaries between work, leisure, and parenting. Many parents now live with a background hum of guilt: that they are too distracted, too reactive, too tethered to their own devices. But these feelings are not failures of individual discipline. They are responses to an environment designed to fragment time and displace presence.
The ethics of parenting, then, can no longer be grounded in simple notions of guidance or protection. What emerges instead is a more complex picture of care: inflected with doubt, mediated by platforms, and shaped by the same tools that affect the child. The parent who scrolls through Instagram while sitting beside their child is not failing to be present—they are inhabiting a form of presence that has been technically redefined.
This makes traditional forms of judgment—about “good” or “bad” parenting—deeply inadequate. To understand parenting today is to observe how gestures of care are enacted in conditions of distraction, exhaustion, and technological mediation. These are not signs of collapse, but of transformation. They ask us to take seriously the emotional and cognitive labor parents perform simply to remain available—to say yes, to say no, to try again.
Only when we see parenting as a co-formation—child and adult both becoming under shared conditions—can we begin to grasp what care now looks like.
Discourse around parenting and technology often trades on fear: themes of damage, loss and contamination. But this framing misses the more interesting story—that of mutual adaptation. Parents and children today are not facing a technology problem. They are undergoing a shared process of becoming, within systems that shape how they feel, remember, and relate.
There is no going back to a pre-digital childhood. That world no longer exists. But the present is not a wasteland, either. It is a site of ongoing negotiation, co-formation, and care. Parents are learning in real time how to hold space for their children’s growth while managing the instability of their own attention and emotion. Children are growing up inside systems that both connect and confuse, delight and distract.
To name this without prescribing is an act of respect. The parent who feels they are “winging it” may be doing something more profound than they realise. They are trying to remain human in an environment that is constantly reorganising what it means to be human. And they are doing so not from a distance, but from beside their children—learning, failing, showing up.
We would do well to replace panic with description, advice with empathy. Parenting in a post-digital age is not about restoring control. It is about growing together in a world where the coordinates keep shifting.
Lewis, Kristin. “I work at a digital security company and thought I was keeping my kids safe from online dangers. My 7-year-old proved me wrong.” Business Insider, 1 July 2025, https://www.businessinsider.com/my-son-outsmarted-me-online-we-both-learned-lesson-2025-7.
Maher, Ilona, Olivia and Adrianna, hosts. “KYLIE KELCE! Mom Dinner, Short Kings & Our Fav 2000s Romcoms.” House of Maher, episode 2, Youtube, 25 June 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnbpTdeAuZc.
Stiegler, Bernard. Taking Care of Youth and the Generations. Translated by Stephen Barker, Stanford University Press, 2010.
Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Translated by Richard Beardsworth and George Collins, Stanford UP, 1998.