Raising Humans During the Digital Wild West

My children were born in 1993, 1996, 1998, and 2013.

Sometimes I sit back and realize I have parented across [entirely] different worlds.

I became a mother young. We were two hardworking parents with full-time jobs, trying to build what we genuinely believed was a good North American life in the late 90s and early 2000s. We worked constantly, bought homes, carried debt, took trips we probably could not afford, consumed too much, rushed too much, worried too much, and convinced ourselves that providing comfort and opportunity would naturally create healthy, grounded adults.

At the time, it felt normal. Everybody was doing it.

What many of us did not fully understand was that while we were busy building lives, an entirely new world was quietly raising our children alongside us.

The internet was not just entertainment. It became culture. Identity. Politics. Masculinity. Belonging. Validation. Anger. Community. Propaganda.

My older children still remember fragments of a more human pace of life. The youngest was born into a world already shaped by screens, algorithms, and permanent digital immersion.

And somewhere in those years, many families like mine watched a divide emerge inside their own homes.

Some young people learned empathy, openness, nuance, and critical thought online. Others were slowly pulled toward grievance, rigidity, cynicism, racism, misogyny, and ideological extremism disguised as “truth” or “strength.”

I do not say this to avoid accountability as a parent. We all shape our children profoundly. But I also think my generation underestimated what we were handing over to technology companies, social media ecosystems, outrage algorithms, and political manipulation machines that learned very quickly how to exploit loneliness, insecurity, ego, and fear — especially in young men searching for identity.

Some of my children moved through that era differently than others.

And today, I will see my eldest son for the first time in a year after painful things were said between us.

Life is humbling that way.

You spend decades raising human beings only to realize history, culture, economics, technology, politics, and the internet were also sitting at the kitchen table the entire time.

That is the honest truth of parenting through this era.

Let’s see how this goes. 💛