Investing in parents is an investment in the future

Vicki Shotbolt – Parent Zone founder and CEO 

We’re half way through a decade that began with a pandemic. The top search queries on Google included, ‘When will lockdown end?’ and ‘Bread recipes’. That seems to pretty much sum up the mood at the time. When disaster strikes, eat carbs. 

The mood at Parent Zone is reflective as we approach the end of 2025. It has been an important year for the work that we do, including some significant changes to the environment in which parents are parenting. The online safety act is now in force. New laws have been put in place to deal with digital offences like cyberflashing and intimate image abuse, and the national curriculum review has added media literacy and financial literacy to the curriculum under citizenship. 

The question we’re asking is whether these changes are being felt by parents – and the immediate answer is ‘not yet’. Research by More in Common shows that 64% of parents remain deeply concerned about online safety. Furthermore, over half of parents think politicians and tech companies aren’t taking the issue of keeping children safe online seriously enough. Given we have just regulated the internet for the first time, with an act that took over five years to make it to the statute books, that seems at odds with the actual level of work that has been done. So what’s going on?

Our assessment is that parents haven’t been listened to. 

A category error has been made because campaigners and policy makers have tried to do to families rather than with and for. The state has tried to parent and it can’t. It can create the conditions in which it is easier to parent but it can’t reach into families and raise children. It can’t know what’s best for individual family circumstances. Rather than start from a position that asked, ‘what can we do to help parents?’, the thought process was ‘what’s right for children?’ You might think those questions get you to the same place and they ultimately do, but the journey to that place is very different. If we’d started by asking how to make it easier to parent children in digital spaces, we wouldn’t have arrived at hundreds of different parental controls. 

More likely, parents would have asked for solutions like digital accounts for children that only need to verify age once. Devices that are age aware with functionality that can be turned off. A statutory duty of care so that when a platform is aware that a child is being harmed they have a duty to report it. Parents definitely wouldn’t have said it was OK to let the most harmful sites off the hook because most of them are small compared to Meta. Nor would they have overlooked gaming or the increasing commercialisation of childhood. Those are the two things that in the real world of parenting crop up all the time. The state would and should have asked itself how best to protect children’s rights and provided clarity to parents about where their rights end and their children’s rights come first. 

Team PZ celebrated when Scotland introduced a total ban on smacking.

The fact that we still allow it in England when it amounts to a ‘reasonable punishment’ is shameful. It also clouds the reality that children’s rights are and should be inviolable, including in the digital world. It is encouraging to see courts around the world start to make judgements about what parents can reasonably consent to on behalf of their child and what they can’t. In Italy a court found that a nursery could not use photos of a child legally based on parental consent, as the best interests of the children prevailed in not having photographs of them in particularly intimate moments of their school and educational experience published online to promote the nursery's activities.  

We hope that courts will continue to intervene to clarify what is often perceived as a tension between parental rights and children’s rights. This matters because a focus on child rights as an absolute, a baseline below which we must not go, allows us to also focus on the question of helping children to flourish, and we know the route to that is supporting parents. Not limiting ourselves to only seeing things through a child rights lens – rather making sure rights are protected so that it becomes possible to think about the best ways to facilitate good enough parenting. Children in Australia must be rolling their eyes at the irony of a debate that started with child rights and ended up with them being banned from social media. The digital equivalent of ‘no ball games on the grass’.