Child-monitoring apps might need a reboot

Pam Wisniewski’s digital adolescence showed her the best and the worst of the internet. At 14, she left an abusive home, where she’d been isolated in a fifth-wheel trailer at the end of a seven-­mile dirt road. She moved in with her older sister and taught herself to type on AOL Instant Messenger. Online, she sought out the support and the community she’d lacked at home. She also discovered how thin the ice can be. “I sent my address to some guy in New Mexico to send me a mug with my name on it,” she recalls. “And then I found a news story like five, 10 years later that he killed somebody.” Those experiences set the course of her career. Wisniewski—now a principal research scientist at the International Computer Science Institute, a nonprofit affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley—has spent well over a decade asking what safety should look like for families navigating an evolving tech landscape, and how to achieve it without sacrificing trust. “I really see the internet as this double-edged sword,” she says. Digital harms have become the defining fear of American parenthood. In the University of Michigan’s 2025 National Poll on Children’s Health , parents’ top three worries had to do with social media, screen time, and internet safety. Nearly half of American teenagers say they have been bullied or harassed online, according to the Pew Research Center . From there, the dangers escalate. Online drug dealers sell counterfeit pills laced with fentanyl. In the first half of 2025, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children fielded more than 23,000 reports of financial sextortion, in which a predator posing as a peer extracts a sexual image from a child and threatens to publish it unless paid. Chatbots are the newest danger, with companies like OpenAI facing lawsuits for allegedly coaching children toward suicide. Most parents’ first defense is conversation. In Pew surveys , more than nine in 10 say they’ve talked with their teens about what’s ap