There was a time when parents could reasonably know where their children were, who they were speaking with, and what they were watching. The boundaries of childhood were imperfect, but they were visible: the school, the neighborhood, the television in the family room, the telephone attached to the wall.
Today, a child can cross the world without leaving a bedroom.
And today, a child can easily find themselves confronted by dangerous and harmful situations online from their own homes.
A tablet opens into games populated by strangers. A messaging feature turns a harmless-looking app into a private conversation with a predator. A school-issued computer can become a doorway to material no parent would knowingly place before a child. A photograph can reveal a child’s location. An innocent username can become an invitation. And a platform that looks like entertainment to a parent may be a social world to a child or teenager, connecting them to strangers across the globe.
The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children reported that online enticement of children for sexual acts occurs across social-media services, messaging apps, and gaming platforms. Its CyberTipline received approximately 1.4 million reports concerning online enticement in 2025, including more than 80,000 reports concerning sextortion.
Many digital dangers do not arrive looking dangerous. They appear as a colorful game, a funny video, a group chat, a disappearing message, a request for virtual currency, or a new online friend who seems to share a child’s interests. The icon on the screen may look innocent.
Even educational devices aren’t immune. One 10-year-old girl received a school-issued Chromebook and was able to access the messaging app Discord, where a predator sent her sexually explicit and abusive messages and even detailed ways to assault and kidnap her.
Online harm also extends beyond predatory contact. Apps may expose children to adult content, bullying, manipulative design, deceptive purchases, location sharing, invasive data collection, or interactions parents never knew were possible. Even products marketed toward children have historically failed to give parents clear information about the data they collect and the interactive features they contain.
For example, smartphone companies such as Android assume parents will proactively configure everything themselves, and that children without involved caregivers can do without protection. Online gaming platform Steam allows any child to make an account without parental permission or age verification — immediately gaining full access to all sexually explicit games.
Tech platforms have even ignored user and internal reports when the harm is blatant. According to documents from a lawsuit by the state of New Mexico, internal data from Snapchat show the company received around 10,000 user reports of sextortion per month; many reports apparently went unresolved or uninvestigated. Meta knowingly allowed adults to contact children. Vaishnavi Jayakumar, Instagram’s former head of safety, testified that Meta had a “17x strike policy,” allowing accounts to engage in up to 16 violations related to sex trafficking before suspension.
Though disturbing, none of this means parents should panic, confiscate every device, or view every online interaction with suspicion. Fear is a poor long-term parenting strategy.
But the solution is not to put the entire burden on parents, yet that’s exactly what’s happening. Big Tech consistently works to avoid responsibility for protecting children online, with tech platforms spending $41 million combined in the first half of 2026 to lobby Congress against online child protection legislation that would hold their companies responsible. There is no other good reason the overwhelmingly bipartisan-supported Kids Online Safety Act hasn’t passed yet except Big Tech’s pressure.
So the responsibility for child protection falls directly onto parents who are being asked to serve as technology specialists, privacy experts, content reviewers, investigators, counselors, and first responders — often with little more than a search bar and their own instincts.
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As parents, we need information at our fingertips — to learn about these issues, to ask questions as they arise, and to connect with key resources. The Parent Center offers parents a free, easy-to-use resource that provides trusted guidance on children’s online safety. It also offers an artificial intelligence tool trained exclusively on curated, expert resources. NCMEC offers a free Take It Down service that can help remove or stop the online sharing of nude, partially nude, or sexually explicit images or videos taken of anyone under 18 years old.
As tech evolves and risks to children increase, governments, elected officials, tech companies, and parents must understand the harms and work to find solutions. Future generations will be thankful.
Richie Hamm is president of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, the leading national nonprofit organization exposing the links between all forms of sexual exploitation, such as child sexual abuse, prostitution, sex trafficking, and the public health harms of pornography.