I need to say something you might not like. Something that hangs in the air between us, a silent, digital ghost in every conversation about screen time, social media, and online safety.
I know what you did online.
And so do your kids, not the specifics, perhaps, but the cultural legacy. The digital world we now fret over, the algorithms we decry, the attention economy we battle for our children’s minds, we didn’t just inherit it. We built it. With every post, share, and careless click.
Before we lecture another generation about digital citizenship, we must first confront the original users: ourselves. We, the first children of the internet, now the adults in charge, were the architects. We were the ones who:
- Posted without thinking, treating the nascent public square like a private diary.
- Overshared because it felt good, validating the economy of personal revelation.
- Clicked “agree” without hesitation, normalizing the surrender of our data and privacy as the price of admission.
- Treated privacy like an abstract concept, until it was too late.
- Rewarded every addictive design with our precious attention and dopamine hits, proving the business model worked.
- Helped build the culture, the comparison, the performativity, the outrage, we now claim to be shocked by in our children.
- Or worse, contributed to or witnessed harm, the bullying, the trolling, the communities festering in darkness, things we’re still not willing to admit to ourselves.
This wasn’t merely the work of a few tech founders in Silicon Valley. As sociologist Zeynep Tufekci has argued, technology is not autonomous; its path is shaped by social, economic, and political forces, forces we participated in. The "Like" button wasn't just created; it was enthusiastically adopted by millions of us, training the algorithms that now shape reality. We were the willing participants in what former tech ethicist Tristan Harris calls the "race to the bottom of the brainstem," where platforms compete for our attention at any cost.
Research confirms this generational footprint. A landmark 2010 study by academics at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Pennsylvania, published in
The Journal of Consumer Research, identified the rise of the "online disinhibition effect", the phenomenon where people feel looser, less restrained, and more likely to act out online. We were its first, unchecked wave. Furthermore, data from the Pew Research Center shows that early social media adoption (2005-2012) was dominated by younger adults, us, who set the behavioral norms of these platforms.
We wanted connection, novelty, and a voice. In the process, we helped codify the norms of a world where privacy is eroded, discourse is polarized, and human psychology is the product.
So, if we want anything to change for our children, it must start with a ruthless honesty about our own relationship with technology. Not with guilt, which is paralyzing, and not with excuses, which are cowardly. But with truth.
We must ask ourselves:
- What did we do?
What was our part in the click, the share, the hate-read, the pile-on?
- What did we ignore?
What red flags did we scroll past because the feed was too compelling?
- What did we enable?
What behaviors did our participation make profitable?
- What are we finally ready to take responsibility for?
Children don’t need adults rewriting digital history or pretending we were wiser than we were. They can smell that hypocrisy from a mile away. They need adults who can look at the mess, a mess with our fingerprints all over it, and say, "We helped make this. We were naive. We made mistakes. And now, we are responsible for fixing it."
They need us to lead with honest integrity.
That means having the hard conversations—not just about their
tech use, but about ours. It means modeling the behavior we want to see: digital mindfulness, critical consumption, ethical sharing, and the courage to disconnect. It means supporting regulation not from a place of panic, but from a place of informed responsibility.
The call is not to wallow in the past, but to build a better future from a place of accountability. Our children don't need perfect digital pioneers as parents. They need honest ones.
I know what we did. The history is in the cache, in the archives, in the design of the world they’ve inherited.
Now, let’s do better. Together.
