Essentials Membership Highlight: Resources for Parents

Protect, Provide, Defend, Teach, Participate

Jul 20, 2026

According to the 2025 Mott Poll, the top 10 health concerns of parents in the US today are all linked to how our kids are using the Internet: social media influence, physical effects from screen time, declining cognitive abilities (due to online media, scrolling, and AI), anxiety and depression, cyber bullying and school violence, content exposure, predators and trafficking, addiction, cultural and worldview radicalization…the list goes on and on. Yet we also recognize that for many parents, leveraging modern technology like smartphones, tablets, and laptops provides a means to communicate with their kids, track their location to ensure their physical safety, and as a resource for learning and social engagement.

Parents, we know life is full and the margins of time and money are so small it can seem impossible to take on anything new or to implement deep changes to our existing schedules and routines to address all this. But we believe the safety and wellness as well as managing the unavoidably transformative effects that come from participating online is not only important, but it is also core to parenting in this digital age. We’re here to help you by providing knowledge, advisories, strategies, tips, and answers to common questions that you can review one-at-a-time based on your priorities and interests, so that you can build the defense that you need.

When it comes to protecting our children from harmful influences, people, activities, and exposures in the real world, as parents we know what to do. For generations back to the beginning of the human story parents have been shepherding their children: protecting them from dangers, training them with knowledge and skills, teaching them values, equipping them for life as adults, surrounding them with family and systems that teach and reinforce culture, and ensuring they know how to be safe in the context they live every day. That is the context that most of us grew up in. Our world was relatively contained. That was before the Internet, and the Internet was never made for kids.

Yet when it comes to the age of the Internet and the online experience, many parents do not realize that using Internet-connected devices and services means letting their children venture into a digital world that can be totally unlike the physical one, yet it is absolutely connected. What happens “there” certainly affects us “here.” Browsing websites, searching for information, watching content, gaming with friends, connecting socially, messaging peers is all often done without any consideration of the threats that are lurking in all those spaces, nor of the unavoidable internal transformation that comes with participating in that larger digital world with the technologies we use. And so it is that without any preparation and without any warning our kids are falling into great harm.

According to data from Pew Research, 95% of US teens have access to the Internet via smartphones, tablets, or laptops, very few with any sort of restrictions, protections, or oversight and almost none of our teens are being equipped with training about online security or digital health. Over half of US teens also reported to Pew Research in 2025 that they are online “constantly,” mostly consuming and generating content through social media, and so it is that screen time has exploded beyond the healthy threshold of one hour a day to a national average of over seven hours a day or nearly 1/2 of a teens waking hours.

Rather than being inherently protected in some of the largest online platforms teens use, these platforms have been found in court rulings to be themselves predatory and addictive in design and also subjecting teens to adult contexts, peer users, and content. Most educational resources focused on youth and the Internet are designed to teach kids coding, typing, website development, AI, or how to make use of Internet resources toward building a future career. In fact, online participation is often encouraged through the various spheres of influence that US teens are in, including home, church, school, and sports or clubs.

And with all this accelerating and unguarded use we that that the identity crisis of yesterday has morphed into a meaning crisis today that is ever expanding among our youth. Depression among teens is at an all-time high as are emergency room visits due to self-harm. A sense of feeling isolated, friendless, and purposeless has taken hold of our youth. And there are predators, influencers, traffickers, scammers, fraudsters, criminals, corruptors of every kind who are going to the same online spaces and resources our youth use, in order to claim new victims and expand their empires at the cost of the hearts, minds, bodies, souls, and property of our children.

Talking directly with parents about all this, I almost always hear a knowing sense of concern. Parents rightly sense the danger and report the ill effects but also feel unequipped with the depth of knowledge and guidance to understand what the risks really are and what to do about them. I have been told stories of addiction to online content, brushes with predators, cases of trafficking, grooming, and more. I have researched this thoroughly and lived it professionally and know of even deeper horror stories. The phrases, “if I had only known,” and “I wish someone had warned me,” are common in these stories of pain relayed by parents.

Well, Practive Security is here to warn you and to equip you with knowledge, strategies, and practices that you can integrate into your family to keep your kids safe from online threats while also teaching them how to integrate technology appropriately into their lives.

In this article I highlight some of the resources available to you today through our Essentials Membership, so you can begin to leverage us as your trusted advisor.

The Parents Page

Members of our Practive Security Essentials service have access to content that is organized by audience, theme, and type. Among this includes our Parents page:

https://www.practivesecurity.com/parents

Currently hosted on this page, Essentials Members will find all that is listed below. Our content is available in different formats including articles you can read online or download to your device or eReader, videos you can watch from our website, or audio you can listen to directly from our website or through the Spotify app. Current content includes all that is listed below, but we are always adding more not only focused on Parents but for all our customers as well.

Resource Highlight: Digital Health and Cyber Security Essentials for Parents (workshop and seminar)

We provide quick links to where parents can purchase a live audio recording of the workshop we recently delivered at the CHEA convention in July 2026, as well as links to purchase our full 5-part series of videos, with part 1 provided for free.

Our 45-minute workshop is an introduction to the issues parents need to be aware of along with a proposal for how to build home-based discipleship or mentorship to help protect our children from the harm that comes from online participation.

Our full-length 5-part seminar is a very detailed expansion of the above introduction, and provides parents recommendations of specific strategies, resources, tools, and practices they can incorporate in their homes. Our Parents page provides a discount code for the seminar so Members can access the deeper content as an added benefit.

Topic Highlight: Age Based Restrictions for Teens

Format: read online or download as PDF

You have probably read the news that legislators and governments throughout the West, including the United States, are moving to codify in law a listing of the moral dangers that come with using social media and AI. While the attention on the negative effects of participating with this technology online is welcome and while we agree with the moral judgement being levied against Big Tech, there is more happening that is apparent, and we believe the solutions required within the legislation are deeply problematic for all of us. We are working to bring you our analysis of the latest through a series of articles all linked under this heading.

The Internet: An Inherently Dangerous World

Format: read online or download as PDF

We need to understand that the online world, what we call the Internet, is an inherently dangerous place. In this digital age, it is almost impossible to escape using the Internet, and doing so does offer many valuable opportunities and enrichments for life. With all of its allure and many benefits, the Internet is openly and persistently hostile yet for some reason we tend to trust the Internet as safe, secure, and that we are protected by those who provide the resources we use. However, the truth is the Internet is heavily weaponized, inherently dangerous, and does not follow the customs or traditions of the culture we live in. We must approach it guarded and with diligence because by default, there are almost no protections from most threats, and that’s by design. In this article we attempt to help you shift your paradigm to approach the Internet for what it really is and to better understand the threats that are lurking.

Strategies for Preparing our Children for the AI World

Format: read online or download as PDF

In this article we answer one of the most common questions we hear from fellow parents: “how do we prepare our kids for the AI world of the future? What do we need to teach them now; how do we prepare them for jobs that will require AI skills?” This is a very important topic, and our perspective may surprise you. In fact, it is a major part of our book about AI released in the summer of 2026 called “Countering the AI Revolution.”

From Influence to Radicalization

Format: video

As parents, part of our core responsibility is to shepherd our children; to teach them, provide for them, and to protect them. A significant part of that means teaching them our story and helping them understand who they are in that context. And in this digital age, many parents say they are deeply concerned about online influences and how they can lead to radicalization. We see the extreme examples and they rightly concern us. But what is often overlooked is that the online platforms we allow our kids to participate in are designed to capture their attention, influence what they are thinking about, and thus to radicalize them. Parents, we need to pay attention to this and to recapture our role. In this video we walk you through why and what to do about it.

Influencing Worldview through Content Exposure

Format: video

In this presentation we explore two examples today of how the cultural forces of the world are trying to establish a new foundational worldview for our children upon which radicalization can be easily built. We talk about the current work underway in the film industry to re-tell part of the Narnia story through a “woke” worldview, and also how the movie, Steps, is trying to redefine evil characters as normal and acceptable. These are both great examples of why parental control solutions that filter access to Internet content based on age ratings and “for children” labels are dangerously insufficient and give a false sense of security. Making content that radicalizes children is a window the world is exploiting, and it is making its way through some forms of digital protections.