A deep need for parental discretion

In a recent BBC interview, OnlyFans content creator Lily Phillips recounted how she got into the business. She was first exposed to pornography at just 11 years old and says, “I’ve never known life without it.” When the interviewer pressed her about the dangers of kids encountering hardcore porn online, she dismissed the concern with a shrug.

It’s hard to watch without heartbreak—and a measure of anger. Like so many children today, Lily was tossed into the adult world, like a lamb among wolves. Now, after years of moral distortion and neural rewiring, she profits by drawing others into the same pit into which she fell. Her story is tragic, but it is not rare.

Many parents are failing their children in a similar way—by handing them smartphones and looking the other way.

In The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt chronicles the surge in adolescent mental illness over the past 15 years. What changed during that time? The rise of smartphones and social media. The connection is not incidental. These devices are doing serious damage to developing minds.

Yet we’ve been slow to respond. We childproof cabinets. We rubberize playgrounds. We sanitize every risk in the physical world—and then hand our kids devices that give them unsupervised access to the entire internet. As Haidt puts it, we are “overprotecting children in the real world and underprotecting them online.” As a result, “we’ve handed them devices that expose them to far greater risks than any playground ever could.”

Giving a child unrestricted internet access is like handing a knife to a toddler. Yes, it’s a tool that can be put to good use in the right hands. But the dangers for undeveloped brains—and unformed consciences—are immense. We have movie ratings that restrict access at theaters to those too young to properly process the content, but then we let them roam free in the limitless theater of the internet, where explicit content is a click away. Parental controls and age-verification systems exist, but they’re often easily bypassed, and explicit material increasingly seeps into mainstream platforms.

Parents: Do not give your kids smartphones.

Some will say the device isn’t the issue—bad parenting is. “Smartphones don’t do anything,” someone replied to me online. This is analogous to saying, “Drugs don’t do anything to people,” or, “Guns don’t do anything to people.” The truth is, smartphones radically amplify the consequences of poor supervision. Others insist that “porn has always been around,” sharing stories about how they might have seen a magazine somewhere, found a VHS tape, or snuck a peek at a site on the family PC. But this is either naïve or willfully obtuse about the scale and scope of the problem today.

The smartphone in a child’s pocket is a portal to the worst content the internet has to offer—at any time, in any place, with no one watching. Smartphones and tablets have obliterated old guardrails. What once required effort to find now finds you instantly—and in infinite supply. We have raised a generation in the digital Wild West and are surprised when they get shot.

Sheltering children until they’re developmentally ready isn’t coddling—it’s responsible parenting. Handing young kids smartphones before they have the tools to navigate them is reckless.

The burden of protecting children from these forces can’t fall solely on the shoulders of parents. We need cultural change: tighter restrictions, tech reform, and public efforts to stigmatize porn and shame the greedy who profit from destructive addiction.

But in the meantime, parents must take responsibility for their own. You cannot wait for better circumstances to arise. Too many are being negligent, and thus are guilty of parental malpractice with regard to the dangers of the internet. Parents must act with urgency.

Haidt proposes delaying smartphones until high school and social media until age 16. But again, he says parents need more help. We need a smartphone-free ecosystem for raising children. This will entail such things as phone-free schools and parental coordination to limit peer pressure and minimize the chance for exposure when your kids are out with friends.

In her interview, Lily described her early exposure to pornography as a kind of enlightenment, crediting it with teaching her about sex. She gained a certain type of knowledge, all right—but one which resembles a fall, similar to how Adam and Eve came to “know” good and evil in a different way in Genesis 3. While none east of Eden are “innocent,” this “knowledge” did rob her of the sweetness of childhood. It deadened her sensitivity to violation, to shame, to the sanctity of her body. She learned that she could be used—and that it was “normal.”

Little Lily deserved better. So do your kids. Protect them now from the wolves of the web that devoured her.