Parenting in the Age of TikTok: How to Set Boundaries Without Losing Connection

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To hear our conversation in real time, listen to the full episode below. Make sure you tune into the show. You’ll get all the raw, unfiltered moments and deeper insights.

Podcast Blog post: Raising Confident Kids in the Age of Technology

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There’s a moment in almost every parenting conversation where you catch yourself saying “it was a different time” — and then immediately have to ask yourself if that’s actually true, or if it just felt safer because you didn’t know any better yet.

That’s exactly where this conversation started. Sherley and Kira sat down to talk about raising kids in the age of TikTok, Roblox, disguised apps, and phones that never leave a kid’s hand — and what came out of it wasn’t a list of rules. It was something more honest: two moms, a decade apart in parenting stages, admitting how much has changed and how much they’re still figuring out. One is parenting a seven-year-old just starting to bump into social media and gaming. The other is parenting teenagers about to head off to college. Between them, they cover almost the entire span of what “growing up online” looks like today.

This isn’t a list of rules to copy and paste into your own house. It’s a real conversation between two parents comparing notes — what’s worked, what hasn’t, what still keeps them up at night, and what they’d tell a younger version of themselves if they could.

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Key Takeaways

• Entertainment and connection are instant now — kids no longer have to “work” for access the way earlier generations did, which changes how boundaries need to be set.
• Some apps are intentionally disguised to look harmless (like a calculator) while functioning as private messaging tools — a phone check alone isn’t enough.
• Gaming platforms like Roblox and Minecraft carry open chat features that most parents don’t fully understand, and that’s exactly where risk tends to hide.
• The same secrecy that allows infidelity to happen unnoticed through apps and messaging is the same secrecy that can put a child in danger — trust in a device is not the same as trust in a person.
• Rigid restriction isn’t the same as safety. Kids who feel safe coming to their parents when something feels “off” online are often safer than kids who are simply locked out of everything.
• Boundaries around social media apply to parents too — protecting your own peace online is part of modeling healthy tech habits for your kids.

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We Worked Harder for Everything — Except Safety

Sherley and Kira spent the first few minutes of their conversation laughing about cassette tapes, VHS recordings, and pressing play at just the right second to catch a song off the radio. Kira remembered having a Motorola two-way pager as a teenager, texting her best friend back and forth on a keyboard the size of a calculator, just to say nothing in particular. Sherley recalled having to press a single number key three or four times just to land on the right letter while texting — no emojis, no autocorrect, just patience.

It’s a familiar kind of nostalgia, the kind every generation has about the one before texting got easy. But underneath the laughter was a real point: entertainment used to take effort. If you wanted to watch a show, you scheduled your life around it or you missed it. If you wanted music, you sat by the radio waiting for your song to come on. Now it’s instant, it’s in a kid’s pocket, and it never really turns off.

That shift matters because it changes what “boundaries” even means. A generation ago, screen time meant negotiating over the television, and the options were genuinely limited — you either watched what was on, or you went outside. Today it means navigating phones, tablets, gaming consoles, and apps that are all designed — intentionally, by teams of engineers — to be as hard to put down as possible. Sherley described her seven-year-old son melting down the first time a streaming platform introduced ads, simply because he’d never had to sit through a commercial in his life. It’s a small moment, but it says a lot about how different the baseline experience of “entertainment” has become for this generation of kids.

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The Apps That Aren’t What They Look Like

One of the more sobering parts of the conversation was about disguised apps — tools built to look like something completely harmless, such as a calculator, while actually functioning underneath as a private messaging and photo-sharing app. Sherley learned about this at a school PTA safety event hosted by local law enforcement, where officers walked parents through app after app that kids use to hide conversations in plain sight. It’s the kind of thing a parent could scroll right past during a routine phone check without a second thought, because on the surface, it looks exactly like a tool for homework.

This is where the “it was a different time” comparison starts to break down. Kira and Sherley both pointed out that danger toward kids has probably always existed in some form, across every generation — but the places it can hide have multiplied, and many of them are built specifically to be invisible to an adult’s eye. Snapchat was one of the first mainstream apps to popularize disappearing messages and photos. Since then, an entire ecosystem of vault apps, secret-messaging tools, and disguised utilities has grown up around that same idea, and most parents simply don’t have the bandwidth to learn every one of them.

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What the Research Says About Kids Online Today

This isn’t just a feeling two moms have on a podcast. Pew Research Center has found that a huge share of teens describe themselves as online almost constantly, with platforms like YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat woven into daily life in a way that simply didn’t exist for previous generations at the same age. That level of access is part of why the conversation Sherley and Kira had matters — it isn’t about whether kids will encounter these platforms, but when, and how prepared they’ll be when they do.

What’s notable is that parents and teens don’t always agree on where the real risk is. Parents tend to worry most about mental health and safety broadly, while kids are more focused on staying connected to friends and finding entertainment. Neither view is wrong — but it’s exactly the kind of gap that makes ongoing conversation, not a one-time “internet safety talk,” so important.

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Gaming Isn’t Just Gaming Anymore

A big part of the episode centered on gaming platforms like Roblox and Minecraft, and the discomfort of parenting in a space you didn’t grow up in yourself. Sherley talked openly about not being a gamer, not fully understanding the chat features built into these platforms, and choosing to hold off on Roblox for her seven-year-old son until she felt more confident navigating it herself. She described feeling “illiterate” in the gaming world in a way she doesn’t feel about social media — and choosing to trust that discomfort rather than override it just because other kids his age were already playing.

That instinct lines up with what child safety researchers have found. Common Sense Media generally considers Roblox most appropriate for kids 13 and up, largely because of the platform’s open chat features and the wide range of user-generated content, which isn’t consistently moderated. That doesn’t mean every younger child needs to be banned from it outright — but it does mean a parent’s discomfort with not fully understanding a game is worth listening to rather than brushing off.

Kira shared a more personal version of this same tension. Her son met a good friend through an Xbox gaming subscription, and for nearly a year, she was uneasy about it — the boy had given her son his home address and invited him over before they’d ever met in person. Kira did her own version of due diligence: talking to the other child’s mother, listening in on conversations, and taking her time before allowing an in-person meeting. It worked out, and the two boys are close friends today. But she was candid that the fear was real in the moment, and that gaming platforms open a door to adult strangers in a way that simply wasn’t possible when she was a kid.

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“Everyone Who Reaches Out to You Isn’t Who They Say They Are”

Kira drew a comparison that’s hard to argue with: the same apps and messaging tools that make infidelity easier to hide from a spouse are the same tools that can make it easier for a stranger to reach a child. If trust can be broken quietly through a screen in a marriage — through DMs, disappearing messages, or a second account no one knows about — it can just as easily be exploited with a child who doesn’t yet know that not everyone online is who they claim to be.

That comparison isn’t just a clever parenting line — it reflects a real and growing pattern. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children has tracked a sharp rise in online enticement reports in recent years, with cases spanning gaming platforms, social apps, and messaging tools alike. This type of exploitation, NCMEC notes, takes place across every kind of platform kids use — not just the ones parents typically think to worry about. It’s a reminder that “stranger danger” conversations can’t stop at the front door anymore; they have to extend into every app a child has access to, including the ones that look completely innocent.

If the trust-and-secrecy comparison Kira made hits close to home for reasons that have nothing to do with parenting, that’s worth sitting with too. We’ve talked before about what it actually takes to rebuild trust after infidelity, and a lot of that same groundwork — noticing the secrecy, naming it, refusing to look away from what a device can hide — applies here as well.

Sherley and Kira also talked about the lighter, but still telling, side of this same idea — viral trends that spread through kids’ social feeds with no adult ever weighing in on whether they’re a good idea. Kira brought up a trend where kids were filming themselves running full speed into people’s wooden fences, apparently inspired by an old commercial neither of them could fully place. It’s a small, almost funny example, but it points to something real: kids absorb what they see online quickly, and not everything trending in front of them has been filtered through good judgment, empathy, or basic respect for other people’s property. That’s a value system parents are still responsible for building, even when the platform itself isn’t.

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Boundaries That Actually Held Up

Neither Sherley nor Kira claimed to have parented screen time perfectly. Sherley was candid that structured daily limits weren’t really in place until her kids were older — for most of their childhood, screen time simply continued as long as homework was finished, right up until bedtime. What did exist consistently was discipline: when her daughter was involved in a bullying incident at school, internet access on her phone was cut off for three months, while calls and texts still worked. When her son, a committed gamer, cursed out of frustration during a gaming session, the same three-month consequence applied to his gaming system — and he cried, not because of the punishment itself, but because he was embarrassed by his own reaction in the moment.

Sherley and her husband also did random phone checks for a stretch of a year or two — not a rigid weekly ritual, but sporadic enough that their kids always knew it was a possibility. Social media apps themselves, including Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat, weren’t allowed until age fifteen in their household, regardless of how many classmates already had them.

Kira, parenting a younger child, has leaned toward a clearer daily structure from the start: a defined one-hour window of screen time after school, shows watched together in the living room rather than alone in a bedroom, and phone or tablet privileges that are the first thing to go when consequences are needed. Neither of them ever used screen time as a reward — only as something that could be taken away, because both recognized how much their kids valued it.

Both approaches worked, in their own way, for their own families. What mattered more than the specific rule was the reason behind it — staying close enough to the child’s world to notice when something felt off, and being willing to adjust as the child, and the technology, kept changing.

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Social Media Boundaries Aren’t Just for Kids

One of the more grounding parts of the conversation had nothing to do with kids at all. Sherley described social media as a highlight reel that isn’t real — a phrase Kira echoed right back to her. Both women talked about the exhaustion of scrolling and comparing, and the specific boundaries they’ve each built to protect their own peace: removing their birthdays from Facebook so they’re not fielding empty “happy birthday”s from people who barely know them, locking down who can see their friends list, and being selective about who gets added at all, especially given how public their work as podcasters makes them.

It’s a reminder that the digital boundaries conversation doesn’t stop once a child grows up — it’s a lifelong skill, and one worth revisiting for yourself, too. We’ve written before about the importance of self-preservation in relationships, and protecting your own energy online is really just another form of it. Modeling healthy limits with your own phone, at your own dinner table, is arguably one of the most effective “internet safety” strategies a parent has, because kids notice what their parents actually do far more than what they say.

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The Real Takeaway: Connection Over Control

If there’s one thing this conversation kept circling back to, it’s that helicoptering and connecting aren’t the same thing. Locking everything down doesn’t teach a child how to recognize danger — it just delays the moment they encounter it without a parent nearby. Kira put it simply: the goal isn’t to keep a child off every app forever. It’s to make sure they’re old enough, and prepared enough, to understand that not everyone who reaches out to them is a friend.

That means the conversations matter as much as the settings do — talking openly about what grooming can look like without needing to name every tactic, why an in-game “friend” isn’t automatically the same as a friend from school, and why an address should never be shared with someone met online, no matter how long they’ve been talking or how trustworthy they seem.

Parenting through technology that changes every year is genuinely hard, and neither Sherley nor Kira pretended otherwise. Both admitted to moments of feeling behind — not knowing what a Roblox chat looks like, not recognizing a trending sound their own child was repeating for weeks, not fully understanding a gaming subscription their son was asking for. But the conversation left one clear thread: the safest kids aren’t necessarily the most restricted ones. They’re the ones who know they can come to their parents when something online doesn’t feel right, and who’ve been told the truth, at an age-appropriate level, about why that matters.

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A Note on Partnership

Parenting decisions around screen time, apps, and online safety aren’t just individual choices — they’re something couples have to navigate together, often in real time, often without a clear rulebook. Kalief and Sherley made these calls as a team, from random phone checks to deciding together when their kids were ready for Instagram. Being on the same page with a partner about what’s allowed, what’s monitored, and what the consequences are removes one more place for confusion, or quiet resentment, to creep into a relationship.

If this is a conversation you and your partner haven’t fully had yet — not just about screen time limits, but about how you talk to each other when you disagree on where the line should be — that’s worth sitting down for, before the next app or trend forces the conversation on you. And if you’re finding it hard to have that conversation without it turning into a fight, choosing the right kind of support — whether that’s a therapist, a counselor, or a coach — can make a real difference in how you and your partner get on the same page.

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Continue the Conversation

This post covers the highlights, but the full conversation between Sherley and Kira goes even deeper — including the complete story of Kira’s son meeting his gaming friend in person, the trend that had kids running into people’s fences, and the moment Sherley realized her whole family was sitting at dinner, all on separate screens, without saying a word to each other.

Listen to the full episode, “Parenting in the Age of TikTok: Raising Confident, Connected Kids in a Digital World,” on Sherley’s Show.

And if this conversation brought up something you and your partner haven’t quite worked through yet, that’s exactly what Sherley’s Show is here for — real, unfiltered conversations about the parts of relationships and family life that don’t come with easy answers.

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Sources Cited (Outside)

• Common Sense Media, “Parents’ Ultimate Guide to Roblox” — commonsensemedia.org

• National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, “Online Enticement” — missingkids.org

• Pew Research Center, “Teens, Social Media and Technology 2024” — pewresearch.org

Internal Links Used (Sherley’s Show)

• “Infidelity Recovery: Key Steps to Rebuilding Trust” — sherleysshow.com

• “The Importance of Self-Preservation in Relationships” — sherleysshow.com

• “Choosing the Right Support: Therapist, Counselor, or Coach” — sherleysshow.com

• Episode: “Parenting in the Age of TikTok” — sherleysshow.com/raising-confident-kids-in-the-age-of-technology

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