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"Just 10 minutes," my friend Desi pressed the timer as her three-year-old daughter stormed off with a smartphone in hand. A musical cartoon played in the background while the daughter danced in a shimmering tutu skirt.
Desi, 43, a full-time mother and housewife, wishes she could be stricter about screen time. But she knows she often doesn't have the time to play with her kids.
"If you don't want your children to be on the phone, you have to play with them," she told me. "Not just be in the same room with them while you're on your phone. But literally hang out and play with them."
I don't recall my parents ever playing with me when I was young. I was mostly left alone to read comic books, to draw, to play. Frankly, my five-year-old self probably wouldn't have been too happy if my parents had joined my playtime.
But things have changed. Parents today seem to be more involved as the environments in which children are being raised continue to evolve.
Today, children move between physical and digital environments almost seamlessly, forcing parents to constantly negotiate and re-negotiate what is safe, acceptable and healthy in spaces that never stop shifting.
"I play toys with my children because otherwise they'd get bored quickly and ask for smartphones. Once they're online, you never know what they'll see," my friend said.
That one line points to the complex reality of modern parenting. It involves the kind of invisible labor my own parents never had to perform back in their day, such as learning to make sense of, navigate, and filter the digital environments their children move through.
As a non-parent myself, I find myself intrigued by how childhood today is shaped not only by algorithms and screen time, but also by how parents today seem to be doing so much to control what is ultimately beyond any of our control.
A new playground
When I was growing up the internet was more of a destination than an unquestionable reality. Instead of going to warnet (a small neighborhood internet cafe often filled with boys) I would visit friends’ houses for impromptu playdates, usually on foot, with my mbak (nanny).
That feels like a different world now. Today, playdates need to be scheduled days or weeks in advance, and whatever outdoor activities children participate in tend to be tightly monitored.
"I wouldn't let my children out because of pollution. And the streets are just too dangerous," said Sherly Haristya, co-founder and executive director of KETEMU, a think tank for technology and ethics. "Being a kid in Jakarta these days is tough."
Our own safety measures have quietly eroded the value of playful meandering. The kind of childhood built around familiar neighborhoods, dropping by friends' houses and spending hours outdoors now feels increasingly incompatible with city life.
Residential spaces are more gated, both physically and socially, while public spaces are sparse and difficult to supervise. Children's freedom of movement has become inseparable from their parents' sense of safety, and for many, keeping kids within their line of sight means bringing them to work or working from home indefinitely.
"Frankly, kids don't have many options these days, and the tech is addictive," said Dyah Pitaloka, an academic at Monash University who studies digital platforms.
It's no surprise, then, that digital spaces have come to occupy such a central role in children's lives. They offer accessibility, stimulation and companionship precisely when the physical environments around them are becoming harder to navigate.
Different dangers
The online playground, though, comes with its own kinds of dangers.
Dyah recalls the time her son, now 20, came across digital avatars on a gaming platform whose genders didn't always align with their real-life identities.
"It was discomforting for him at first to see how his friends would use an application to alter their voice to a different gender, although he had learned, in theory, that gender is non-binary," she said.
“Then, there was the casual bullying he sometimes witnessed. All of this was confronting for him, especially since he was just in middle school.”
The scale of the problem is hard to ignore. A 2023 study by Indonesia's Ministry of Women's Empowerment and Child Protection, conducted with UNICEF, found that nearly half of Indonesian children had experienced online bullying, and more than 50 percent had encountered sexual content through social media. Forty-two percent said they had felt uncomfortable or afraid because of something they experienced online.
Vifick, 42, a freelance photographer raising a five-year-old son, knows the dangers of excessive screen time. But he also knows that keeping kids entirely offline isn't the answer.
"If he's not part of these online social groups, where most of his friends will be, I'm worried he's the one who gets bullied," he said.
Dyah makes the same point from her own experience. By the time her son was in middle school, he was already using digital platforms to find work. The internet wasn't only a risk to manage; it was a skill he needed to develop.
Curating a digital childhood
Vifick’s philosophy when it comes to his son’s online habits is fairly pragmatic. He is aware he wouldn't be able to fully restrict these online spaces, and what better way to handle it than to prepare his son for what’s to come? More than that, he wants his son to play freely, to be a ‘rebel’, to step out of his comfort zone.
He believes there are ways to mitigate online harms: “That is by actively participating and learning about this world.”
So he does what many modern parents try to do, and does it early: curate a safe, age-appropriate digital reality. When his son was three, Vifick created an Instagram account to document his growth, then started archiving posts on topics his son enjoys, like archeology and dinosaurs, hoping to demonstrate that social media can be useful rather than just entertaining.
These days, Vifick spends more time on TikTok, Instagram and Threads, learning how each platform constructs its own environment. He calls it reconnaissance.
I told him I found this approach a little unsettling. But I admit he has a point.
“I need to learn as much as possible about these digital spaces, so that when my son grows up, I know what kind of environment he’d encounter,” he said. "If my son is going to be on Roblox, I'll be there too—not to watch him play, but just so I know what the environment is like.”
This approach is uncommon. According to the same ministry and UNICEF study, 60 percent of parents said they believed their child knew more about the internet than they did, and fewer than 40 percent felt they had sufficient knowledge to help. And that’s likely because of how much time and energy all this takes.
Vifick does all of this on top of enforcing screen time limits and a reward system. What he's describing isn't just screen time management. It's the hours spent defining what healthy online habits even look like, researching platforms, managing safety settings across different apps, preparing talking points about limits and trade-offs, and then modeling the right behavior himself.
“That’s why, one child is enough,” he said, laughing.
Dyah approaches it from a researcher's vantage point. She immersed herself in gaming, which is also her academic focus, so she could understand firsthand what her son was encountering. Even with information on her side, she knows how hard it is to hold the line in a country where optimism about technology runs deep.
“It’s an upstream battle,” she said. “If we want to play with our kids, we also need to put our phones away. To have dinner conversations without phones… that’s very, very difficult to do nowadays.”
For some parents, that means drawing harder lines.
Sherly limits her 10 and seven-year-old sons on social media, prohibits them from using Roblox and one day might choose dumb phones over smartphones.
“My eldest son often asked me why I’m different from other parents,” she said. “Even with a [social media] ban, a lot of harmful content still slips into the streams.”
In need of support
To offset the pull of online games, Sherly prefers to pay for streaming services like Netflix, where content can be tightly curated, and after school lessons. But she knows this is a privilege many parents don’t have, especially in local school environments.
Schools, which should act as part of a larger support system for parents, are still ill-equipped in educating children about how to use social media or AI chatbots responsibly.
“Children are aware enough of the dangers, but there is no mechanism in school when an emergency case, like online assault, happens,” said Sherly.
Indoor playgrounds are an option, but they’re quite pricey and therefore not always accessible to those with limited resources.
The government's move to protect children through age-based online restrictions addresses a real concern, but raises other issues, such as privacy risks and the removal of channels children use to communicate and access information.
The ban also says nothing about the physical environments that pushed children online in the first place, the schools still unequipped to handle an online assault, or the parents already spending hours a week on platform research and safety settings with little guidance.
A ban tells children where they can't go. It doesn't help parents with everything that comes after.
That's the larger problem. Parents are managing all of this largely alone, with no institutional support and no shared framework for what good even looks like, while navigating the emotional challenge of setting boundaries around technology and screen time.
“It can be a daily battle,” Sherly said.
Vifick feels the same weight.
“It’s exhausting to keep up with online trends,” he said. “But I do it because I want to be friends with my son. I want him to be comfortable with me. I want him to see that I understand what he’s going through when he navigates these online spaces.”
