Parenting in the Time of Algorithms: The Quiet Competition for Attention, Identity and Belonging
Every generation of parents has had to accept an uncomfortable truth: children gradually become people whose thoughts, values and identities are shaped by influences well beyond the family home. We may provide their earliest understanding of relationships, safety and belonging, but we do not retain exclusive editorial control over the people they become. Friends, teachers, communities, popular culture and the occasional spectacularly unsuitable role model all contribute to the process.
This is not a failure of parenting. It is part of growing up.
Yet something interesting has changed in the relationship between childhood and the wider world. Increasingly, young people encounter environments that observe their behaviour, anticipate their interests and continually adjust what they see. These systems do not know a child in the human sense. They do not understand the complexity of a developing personality, the history behind an insecurity or the difference between curiosity and vulnerability. Nevertheless, they can become remarkably effective at delivering content that captures attention and encourages further engagement.
For those of us interested in psychological development, this raises questions that extend considerably beyond screen time. We might reasonably ask what happens to a young person's developing sense of identity when some of the influences shaping that identity are selected by systems whose primary purpose may have little to do with healthy human development.
We have always become ourselves through others
Developmental psychology has long recognised that identity emerges through relationships and social experience. Indulge me for a few sentences, while I try to prove I know something about the developing human…
Urie Bronfenbrenner's ecological approach to human development helped establish the importance of understanding children within the interconnected environments of family, school, community and wider society. Albert Bandura's work on social learning drew attention to how people learn by observing others, while the tradition of social comparison research, associated with Leon Festinger, explored how we evaluate ourselves partly through comparisons with those around us.
None of these ideas is especially new. What is new is the environment in which they must now be considered.
A young person developing an understanding of attractiveness, success, masculinity, femininity, popularity or social acceptance may encounter hundreds of representations of these ideas within a relatively short period. Some will be educational, affirming or entertaining. Others may offer highly selective pictures of supposedly ordinary lives, reinforced by repeated exposure and the impression that everyone else seems to be living according to the same expectations.
For me, the psychological concern is not that children are incapable of distinguishing reality from fantasy. Many young people demonstrate considerable sophistication in navigating online culture. Rather, repeated exposure can influence what feels familiar, desirable or socially normal, particularly during developmental periods when acceptance and belonging carry considerable emotional weight.
There is a meaningful difference between seeing something and gradually coming to believe that it represents the world.
When attention becomes part of the developmental environment
We often speak about attention as though it were simply a matter of individual discipline. A child becomes distracted, a teenager keeps scrolling, an adult loses another half-hour to something that seemed moderately interesting. The familiar response is that people should exercise greater self-control.
There is some truth in that. Self-regulation matters. Yet this explanation overlooks the deliberate design of digital environments.
Recommendation algorithms, notifications, endless feeds and personalised suggestions can make continued engagement remarkably easy. Australia's eSafety Commissioner has identified a significant problem with engagement-based recommendation systems: they do not necessarily distinguish between positive and negative forms of attention. Something that provokes fear, anger or distress may attract engagement just as effectively as something informative or uplifting.
From a psychological perspective, the distinction matters. Attention is not merely a commodity that individuals spend. It is also one of the ways we learn, develop priorities, form memories and build relationships. The environments that repeatedly attract our attention can therefore participate in shaping what we notice and how we interpret experience.
There is a further complication. Personalisation may strengthen existing interests and assumptions by presenting more of what resembles previous engagement. That can deepen learning, but it can also reduce exposure to alternative perspectives. A young person's experience of the world may become increasingly shaped by material that confirms an emerging belief rather than challenges it.
Of course, families are quite capable of creating their own echo chambers without technological assistance. The difference is that personalised digital systems can reproduce these patterns at considerable speed and scale.
The evidence is more complicated than the headlines
It would be convenient to declare that social media is responsible for declining adolescent mental health, close the argument and return to more reassuring parenting concerns. Unfortunately, the research is not nearly so accommodating.
A major 2024 review by the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine concluded that the available evidence did not establish that social media causes changes in adolescent health at a population level. It nevertheless identified plausible harms associated with unhealthy social comparison, harmful content and the displacement of sleep, exercise and other activities.
Australian findings add further complexity.
A longitudinal study published in the Medical Journal of Australia in June 2026 followed young people recruited through Melbourne schools. It found that higher daily social media use was associated with small increases in subsequent depressive symptoms and poorer wellbeing, with the greatest estimated risks occurring during early adolescence.
Meanwhile, a much larger Australian study published in JAMA Pediatrics in January 2026 identified a more complicated pattern: moderate use was associated with better wellbeing than either no use or high use in several adolescent groups. The researchers emphasised that their observational findings should not be interpreted as proof of causation.
These studies ask somewhat different questions and use different methods, so their findings should not be treated as directly interchangeable. Together, however, they challenge the assumption that one simple rule can adequately explain the relationship between digital participation and psychological wellbeing.
A young person's developmental stage, existing vulnerabilities, relationships and particular online experiences all matter. So does the difference between actively participating in a supportive community and repeatedly consuming material that leaves someone feeling inadequate.
The task is to understand the mechanisms through which digital experiences might help or harm, rather than treating technology itself as a diagnosis.
The search for belonging has acquired new companions
Perhaps the most intriguing development is that digital influence no longer comes only from other people.
Artificial intelligence is introducing forms of interaction in which a young person may seek information, reassurance, advice or companionship from a system capable of producing increasingly personal and responsive conversations.
In 2026, the eSafety Commissioner surveyed 1,950 Australian children aged 10 to 17 about their experiences with AI assistants and companions. The resulting Talking to machines report found that 78 per cent had used an AI assistant, while 8 per cent had used an AI companion. Among children who had used either type of tool, 54 per cent reported using it for personal or social reasons, including seeking advice or discussing feelings and difficulties.
These findings deserve attention, although they do not establish that AI relationships are replacing human ones.
There can be genuine benefits in accessible explanations, opportunities for learning and assistance with problems a young person finds difficult to articulate. But the psychological distinction between a responsive system and a reciprocal human relationship remains significant.
A good relationship involves more than receiving an agreeable response. It involves negotiating difference, tolerating frustration, developing empathy and gradually recognising that other people have needs, experiences and perspectives independent of our own.
A system that adapts to our preferences may provide useful support. Whether it can adequately help young people develop the full range of capacities associated with reciprocal human relationships is a different, and still developing, research question.
This is not an argument for dismissing young people's digital relationships. For some, particularly those experiencing isolation or struggling to find acceptance in their immediate environment, online communities can provide meaningful connection and affirmation. The American Psychological Association's advisory on adolescent social media useacknowledges these potential benefits, including the importance of supportive connections for marginalised young people.
Belonging, after all, is not less meaningful simply because the first conversation happened online.
The responsibility cannot rest entirely with parents
One difficulty with contemporary discussions about technology is the tendency to place responsibility almost exclusively on families. Parents are expected to supervise devices, understand emerging platforms, recognise algorithmic risks, establish appropriate boundaries, protect privacy, support mental health and somehow remain knowledgeable about technology that changes faster than most workplace software.
We might reasonably ask whether this is a sustainable allocation of responsibility.
Families have an essential role, but platforms also make design decisions that influence what children encounter. Schools have responsibilities for developing digital literacy. Policymakers have responsibilities for the conditions in which commercial technologies operate. Children's wellbeing cannot depend entirely upon parental vigilance while the systems shaping their experiences remain difficult to understand or scrutinise.
Nor should we overlook the position of adults themselves. Parents, professionals and educators are equally capable of becoming absorbed in personalised information environments, where familiar opinions are reinforced and opposing perspectives become increasingly irritating. It is difficult to teach a young person intellectual curiosity while demonstrating very little willingness to question our own digital assumptions.
Perhaps some of the most useful modelling we can offer children is the ability to change our minds, recognise when we have been misled and admit that an online argument has captured far more of our attention than it deserved.
Parenting as a relationship, not a system of control
In psychological practice, one of the recurring challenges of human relationships is learning to distinguish influence from control. We can guide, encourage, teach, challenge and support another person, but we cannot guarantee what they will think or how they will respond.
Parenting is no exception.
The developmental task is not to preserve permanent parental authority over every influence a young person encounters. It is to help them build the emotional and intellectual capacities needed to evaluate those influences for themselves.
This requires boundaries appropriate to age and maturity, but also trust, psychological safety and the possibility of disagreement. Young people need opportunities to discuss questionable ideas without every conversation becoming a disciplinary event. They need adults who can remain curious about unfamiliar digital cultures without assuming that unfamiliarity automatically means danger.
Most importantly, they need relationships in which they are known as people rather than as collections of preferences, behaviours and predicted interests.
This thinking also informs Family Digital Detox: Reclaiming Our Home from the Screens Outside It, which I co-authored with Laurence Catzel. Although the book addresses the practical challenges of technology in family life, the underlying concern is relational: what happens when the ordinary spaces through which families connect, negotiate, laugh, disagree and understand one another become increasingly occupied by digital demands?
I suspect that one of the important tasks of contemporary parenting will be protecting opportunities for precisely these experiences. Not because the digital world is inherently hostile to human development, but because developing a sense of self requires more than exposure to information and personalised feedback.
Children need adults who are prepared to listen, challenge, explain, occasionally misunderstand and remain present through the resulting disagreement. They need relationships that are not continuously optimised around engagement, convenience or preference.
Algorithms may become increasingly sophisticated at predicting what captures a young person's attention. The more important question is whether we are maintaining the human relationships that help them understand why something deserves that attention in the first place.
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