Your Kids Are Being Raised By Strangers On The Internet And You Have No Idea What They're Learning

When Drake and Adin Ross faced their third lawsuit in three months for promoting illegal gambling to millions of young viewers, most coverage focused on the legal drama. Few asked the more terrifying question: how did two strangers on the internet gain enough influence over teenagers to teach them gambling habits that research shows lead to the highest suicide rate among all addictions?

The answer is simple and horrifying. Your children spend more time with internet personalities than they spend with you. And unlike you, these strangers have no obligations to your child's wellbeing, no accountability for the lessons they teach, and financial incentives to exploit your child's trust for profit.

The Drake and Ross case isn't an anomaly. It's a window into how parenting has been outsourced to algorithms, and most parents have no idea it's happening.

The Numbers Nobody Wants to Face

Children aged 11 to 14 average close to 9 hours of screen time per day. Teenagers between 13 and 18 spend 8 hours and 39 minutes daily on entertainment screen time, not including homework or school. Gen Z averages about 9 hours a day on screens overall. By comparison, children aged 8 to 12 spend 5 hours and 33 minutes daily on screens.

Let's put that in perspective. If your teenager sleeps 8 hours a night, that leaves 16 waking hours. They're spending more than half of their waking life staring at screens. During those 9 hours, they're not with you. They're with strangers you've never met, learning values you never taught, absorbing messages you never approved.

And here's what breaks my heart: most parents have no idea this is happening. They think their kid is "just on their phone" in their bedroom. They don't realize their child is building relationships with people who view that child as a revenue stream, not a human being who deserves protection.

Research shows that teens spend an average of 4.8 hours per day specifically on social media apps. Girls average 5.3 hours versus 4.4 hours for boys. They spend 1.9 hours daily on YouTube and 1.5 hours on TikTok. Children in the United States spend an average of 1 hour and 53 minutes on TikTok alone.

Parents spend far less time in direct conversation with their children. Studies suggest the average parent spends less than one hour per day in meaningful interaction with their teenage children. Your teenager is spending five times longer with TikTok than with you. Who do you think is having a bigger impact on their values, beliefs, and behavior?

This should be the stat that keeps every parent awake at night. We're being outvoted 5 to 1 by an algorithm that doesn't love our children, doesn't want what's best for them, and exists solely to extract their attention for profit. And we're letting it happen because we're tired, busy, and overwhelmed.

During the COVID pandemic, screen time among teens doubled from 3.8 hours per day to 7.7 hours daily, excluding virtual classrooms. After lockdowns ended, 62 percent of U.S. parents reported that their children were spending more than 4 hours daily in front of screens. That elevated usage never returned to pre-pandemic levels. The temporary became permanent.

Most alarmingly, 49 percent of children aged 0 to 2 interact with smartphones. Nearly half of toddlers who can barely speak are already forming relationships with screens. By the time they're teenagers, screen-based relationships will feel more natural than face-to-face interaction.

Think about that for a moment. Babies who haven't learned to use the toilet are already learning to swipe on screens. We're handing devices to children whose brains are in the most critical development phase of their entire lives, and we have almost no idea what the long-term consequences will be. We're conducting a massive uncontrolled experiment on an entire generation, and we won't know if we've broken something fundamental until it's too late to fix it.

The Parasocial Trap

Your children aren't just watching content. They're forming relationships. Research on parasocial relationships, which are one-sided emotional bonds between audiences and media personalities, shows these connections are powerful and deceptive.

Studies demonstrate that parasocial relationships with social media influencers positively correlate with purchase intentions, brand trust, and behavioral changes. When teenagers develop parasocial bonds with influencers, they trust those strangers more than traditional advertising. Research shows teens are willing to be less critical and skeptical of an influencer's advertisement if a parasocial relationship is present.

Influencers deliberately cultivate these relationships. Platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Twitch facilitate parasocial bond formation by encouraging self-disclosure, creating illusions of immediacy, and offering substitutes for social interaction. Research confirms that followers treat relationships with influencers more like friendship rather than fanship.

Your teenager watches Adin Ross livestream for hours and feels like they're hanging out with a friend. They watch Drake, who has sold over 170 million records worldwide, bet massive sums gambling and absorb the lesson that this behavior is normal among successful people they admire. The parasocial relationship makes them trust these strangers in ways they wouldn't trust obvious advertising.

Research published in academic journals shows that adolescents' entertainment value of influencer content, influencer expertise, trustworthiness, attractiveness, and perceived similarity all positively correlate with stronger parasocial relationships. These relationships then drive materialism and purchase intentions.

When Ross promotes illegal gambling, your child doesn't process it as "this is a paid advertisement." They process it as "my friend Ross really loves this." The trust is real even though the friendship is entirely one-sided. Ross doesn't know your child exists. Your child feels like they know Ross intimately.

Studies show loneliness is a strong predictor of parasocial interaction. Young people who are lonely look to social media influencers who post content of themselves with friends to combat their loneliness. The uploads depict the life they wish they had, so they spend more time watching, deepening the parasocial bond while remaining actually alone.

What They're Actually Learning

Let's inventory what internet strangers are teaching your children during those 9 hours of daily screen time.

They're learning beauty standards from Instagram influencers who use filters, plastic surgery, and professional lighting to create impossible ideals. Research shows 91 percent of women are unhappy with their bodies, and 98 percent of people who have been body shamed see negative impacts on their mental health. Your daughter spends hours watching influencers with artificially enhanced appearances and absorbs the message that her natural body is inadequate.

They're learning financial advice from TikTokers with zero qualifications. Cryptocurrency scams, get-rich-quick schemes, and dangerous investment strategies get promoted by influencers who are paid to deliver those messages. Your son watches someone his age claim to make millions from trading and believes it's attainable if he just follows their link.

They're learning relationship models from YouTube couples who stage drama for views. The version of romance and conflict resolution your child absorbs comes from strangers performing relationships for algorithmic engagement, not from authentic human connection.

They're learning political views from content creators who radicalize gradually, moving viewers from mainstream content to increasingly extreme positions. Research on YouTube's recommendation algorithm shows it pushes users toward more extreme content to maintain engagement. Your child starts watching gaming videos and ends up consuming political extremism without ever intentionally seeking it.

They're learning moral frameworks from influencers whose primary value is clickability. What generates engagement becomes what seems true. What trends becomes what's acceptable. The wisdom of crowds replaces deliberate ethical teaching.

Most dangerously, they're learning that illegal behavior is normal and consequence-free. When Drake and Ross promote illegal gambling to audiences full of teenagers, they normalize lawbreaking. Research shows 4 to 8 percent of youth develop problem gambling compared to 1 percent of adults, and children introduced to gambling by age 12 are four times more likely to develop gambling problems later in life.

But gambling is just one example. Influencers promote supplement scams that can damage developing bodies. They normalize excessive consumption and materialism. They model parasocial intimacy that replaces genuine friendship. They demonstrate that success means going viral, not contributing to society.

The Algorithm Decides What Your Child Sees

The most terrifying part is that you can't monitor this even if you wanted to. The content your child consumes isn't chosen by them or you. It's chosen by algorithms optimized for engagement, not wellbeing.

Research shows recommendation engines push users toward content that generates strong emotional responses because that content keeps people watching longer. Platforms make money from attention, so algorithms are designed to capture and hold attention using any psychological trick available.

Your child doesn't search for gambling content. The algorithm recommends it after they watch one Drake music video. They don't look for extreme political content. The algorithm gradually slides them there from mainstream entertainment. They don't seek out pro-anorexia communities. The algorithm connects them with others who reinforce disordered thinking.

Studies demonstrate that 45 percent of teens say they spend too much time on social media, but they keep watching anyway. The platforms are designed to be addictive. Features like infinite scroll, autoplay, and strategically timed notifications exploit psychological vulnerabilities to keep users engaged past the point where they want to stop.

The average person checks their phone 96 times per day. For teenagers, that number climbs dramatically. Research shows younger millennials check their phones around 150 times daily. Your child isn't choosing to interrupt their life constantly. Their brain is responding to deliberately engineered addiction mechanics.

When you tell your child to limit screen time, you're asking them to resist billion-dollar psychological engineering specifically designed to defeat willpower. It's like asking someone to resist heroin through willpower alone. The addiction is the point. The platforms profit from compulsive use.

The Parental Monitoring Illusion

Most parents believe they're monitoring their children's online activity. The data tells a different story. Research shows 84 percent of U.S. parents keep an eye on what their kids do online, up from 78 percent in 2020. That sounds reassuring until you examine what "monitoring" actually means.

Over half of parents monitor their children's chat apps frequently, and 51 percent monitor social media accounts and posts frequently. But parents hardly use built-in tools on specific apps. On platforms like Discord and Snapchat, fewer than 1 percent of minors have parents using built-in parental monitoring tools. By the end of 2022, fewer than 10 percent of teens on Instagram had turned on parental controls.

What parents call monitoring often means glancing at a child's feed occasionally or asking "what are you watching?" The child shows them one video while the previous hour included content the parent would never approve. The sheer volume makes comprehensive monitoring impossible. When your child watches 9 hours of content daily, reviewing even a fraction requires hours of your own time.

One in six parents admit they probably wouldn't know if their child was betting online. Over half aren't aware of their state's legal age for online gambling. Only one in four parents have talked to their teen about online betting. If parents can't monitor something as obvious and illegal as underage gambling, what chance do they have of catching subtle lessons about body image, relationships, or values?

The platforms actively resist parental oversight. Features that would make monitoring easier, like comprehensive viewing histories or content filters that actually work, aren't implemented because they reduce engagement. When parents can easily see and control what children watch, children watch less. Platforms profit from children watching more, so meaningful parental controls remain deliberately inadequate.

Research shows 60 percent of parents in the United States limit their children's screen time. Twenty-seven percent of parents limit screen time every day. But limiting doesn't mean eliminating. Children who are restricted to 4 hours of screen time daily are still spending more time with internet strangers than with their parents.

The Mental Health Crisis Nobody's Acknowledging

The consequences of this outsourced parenting are measurable and devastating. Research shows 51 percent of U.S. teens report spending at least four hours a day on social media apps, and this usage correlates with documented mental health problems.

Studies demonstrate direct connections between excessive screen time and anxiety, depression, sleep disturbances, and decreased psychological wellbeing. Among all the documented harms, one pattern stands out: teens who spend more time on social media rate themselves as being less conscientious and live with parents who are less likely to restrict screen time.

The percentage of teens who say social media makes them feel supported has declined from 67 percent in 2022 to 52 percent in 2024. Despite spending more time on these platforms, teenagers report feeling less connected and more isolated. The parasocial relationships don't fulfill genuine human needs for connection even as they consume time that could be spent building real relationships.

Research on cyberbullying shows 26.5 percent of U.S. teens aged 13 to 17 experienced cyberbullying in the past month as of 2023. The percentages of those who experienced cyberbullying at some point in their lives more than doubled from 18.8 percent in 2007 to 54.6 percent in 2023. More than half of teenagers have been bullied online, often by strangers or peers emboldened by internet anonymity.

Adolescent girls are particularly affected, with 59.2 percent experiencing cyberbullying in their lifetimes compared to 49.5 percent of boys. The gender disparity reflects broader patterns of how online spaces treat young women, who face coordinated harassment campaigns, sexual exploitation, and appearance-based attacks at rates that would be criminal if they occurred in person.

Studies show that teenagers with gambling problems, the kind Drake and Ross allegedly helped create, report more negative life experiences overall and more major negative life events than non-gamblers. They're more likely to use illegal drugs, experience violence, and suffer from depression, stress, and anxiety. Among all addictions, gambling addiction has the highest correlation with suicide.

When internet strangers teach your children habits that lead to addiction, mental illness, and elevated suicide risk, that's not entertainment. That's harm.

We've Abandoned a Generation

I've covered digital culture for years, and what disturbs me most about the Drake and Ross lawsuit isn't the alleged gambling fraud. It's how normalized the underlying dynamic has become. Two strangers spent years building parasocial relationships with millions of teenagers, then allegedly monetized that trust by promoting illegal gambling. And most parents had no idea it was happening.

This is the world we've created. Children spend more waking hours with internet personalities than with parents, teachers, or coaches combined. These strangers face no background checks, no oversight, no accountability for the lessons they teach. When they harm children for profit, parents discover the damage years later, if they ever discover it at all.

The technology moves faster than parenting strategies. When I was a teenager, my parents could monitor my life by knowing where I was physically. If I was home, I was safe. If I was at a friend's house, they could call the friend's parents. Physical location determined access.

Now your child sits in their bedroom under your roof while building relationships with strangers in different countries who are paid to exploit their trust. The bedroom isn't safe. Home isn't protected. Your child is accessible to anyone with internet connection and sufficient production value to seem trustworthy.

The platforms facilitate this by design. Every feature, from infinite scroll to recommendation algorithms to parasocial affordances like comments and direct messages, is engineered to deepen engagement regardless of harm. When researchers point out that the design causes addiction, the platforms respond with cosmetic changes that don't threaten their business model.

Parents bear responsibility too. We handed children devices connected to the internet without understanding what we were handing them. We used screens as electronic babysitters because we were busy and tired and screens kept children quiet. We failed to establish boundaries early, and now those boundaries feel impossible to enforce with teenagers whose entire social lives exist on platforms we don't understand.

The solution isn't simple, but it starts with honesty. Your child is being raised by strangers. Those strangers don't love your child. They don't care about your child's wellbeing. They care about engagement metrics and sponsorship deals. The lessons they teach are designed to benefit themselves, not your child.

What Parents Can Actually Do

Acknowledging the problem is the first step. Your child's relationship with internet personalities is real to them even though it's artificial by design. Those parasocial bonds influence behavior, values, and beliefs. You can't compete by denying the relationships exist. You have to compete by building genuine relationships that fulfill the same psychological needs.

Start by actually knowing what your child watches. Not glancing at their feed, but watching entire videos with them. Understanding who they follow and why. Asking genuine questions about what they like about specific creators. Creating space for them to share their online life without judgment.

Research shows that 76 percent of parents actively strive to monitor screen time usage, but monitoring isn't enough. You need to actively counterprogram the lessons internet strangers are teaching. When your child watches influencers promoting materialism, discuss why that message benefits the influencer financially. When they see gambling normalized, explain the actual odds and the documented harms of addiction.

Set boundaries that you actually enforce. Research confirms that parents who restrict screen time have children who spend less time online and report better mental health outcomes. But the restriction has to be real. Saying screen time is limited while making exceptions whenever convenient teaches your child that boundaries are negotiable.

Create alternatives to screen time that actually appeal to teenagers. Telling your child to "go outside and play" doesn't work when all their friends are online. But facilitating real-world activities that involve their friends, supporting hobbies that create genuine competence, and modeling non-screen-based relaxation gives them alternatives that meet psychological needs.

Talk explicitly about parasocial relationships and how they work. Explain that influencers are performing a version of themselves designed to generate engagement. Discuss how the friendship feels real to your child but is entirely one-sided. Make it clear that someone who doesn't know your child exists cannot actually care about your child's wellbeing, no matter how genuine they seem.

Most importantly, build a relationship where your child wants to talk to you about what they're seeing online. If your response to discovering they watch content you disapprove of is anger and punishment, they'll hide their online life from you. If your response is curiosity and conversation, they'll keep sharing. You can't protect them from what you don't know about.

The Industry Changes We Need

Individual parenting solutions aren't enough when billion-dollar industries engineer addiction in children. We need regulatory frameworks that hold platforms accountable for harm caused by their algorithms and design choices.

Platforms should be required to implement robust age verification that actually works, not cursory checkboxes that any child can lie through. When a platform's revenue depends on engaging children, they have no incentive to exclude children. External regulation is necessary.

Influencers who promote products to audiences that include significant numbers of minors should face the same restrictions that apply to television advertising aimed at children. If you can't advertise sugary cereals during Saturday morning cartoons, you shouldn't be able to have influencers promote gambling to teenagers through parasocial relationships.

Algorithms that recommend content to minors should be required to prioritize safety over engagement. If a platform's algorithm pushes children toward eating disorder content, gambling, or political radicalization, that platform should face penalties severe enough to change behavior. Current liability protections allow platforms to profit from harm while claiming they can't control what users post.

Research funding should prioritize understanding the long-term effects of childhood parasocial relationships, algorithm-driven content consumption, and screen addiction. We're conducting a massive uncontrolled experiment on an entire generation, and we're not systematically tracking the outcomes. Decades from now, we'll understand the full damage. We should be studying it now.

The Generational Divide

The fundamental challenge is that parents and children experience the internet completely differently. Parents remember a time before social media, before smartphones, before constant connectivity. We can imagine life without screens because we lived it.

Children born after 2000 have never known a world without internet connection. For them, online relationships aren't less real than in-person relationships, they're just different formats for the same fundamental human need for connection. Telling them internet friendships aren't real feels like telling them their experiences aren't valid.

This generational divide makes it difficult for parents to understand how profoundly internet culture shapes children's development. When we were teenagers, our peer group was limited to people in our physical proximity. Our children's peer groups are global and algorithmically curated. The feedback loops that shape their identity formation are fundamentally different from anything we experienced.

Research shows children aged 8 to 18 spend an average of 7.5 hours daily engaged with screens according to the CDC. That's more time than they spend sleeping. It's more time than they spend in school. The primary environment of childhood development is now digital, and parents are largely absent from that environment.

The solution can't be returning to a pre-internet past that no longer exists. It has to involve meeting children in the spaces where they actually live while teaching them to navigate those spaces critically. But that requires parents to develop literacy in platforms and cultures they don't intuitively understand.

The Drake and Ross Connection

The lawsuit against Drake and Adin Ross matters because it exposes the mechanics of how internet strangers monetize relationships with children. According to court documents, they allegedly spent years building trust with young audiences, then leveraged that trust to promote illegal gambling using house money disguised as personal funds.

The lawsuit alleges they used Stake's tipping system to move large sums of money while concealing the financial arrangements. Young viewers watched what they thought was genuine gambling by people who could afford to lose. They didn't understand they were watching paid performance using free money.

Research shows that 4 to 8 percent of youth develop problem gambling, and children introduced to gambling by age 12 are four times more likely to develop problems later. When Drake and Ross promoted gambling to audiences that included young teenagers, they were potentially creating lifetime addicts during the most vulnerable developmental window.

But the gambling is almost beside the point. The real story is how two strangers gained sufficient influence over millions of teenagers to teach them anything at all. The parasocial relationships, the algorithmic distribution, the hours of daily exposure, the lack of parental awareness or oversight. Those are the mechanisms that make this kind of exploitation possible.

Every influencer promoting dangerous products to children uses the same playbook. Build parasocial relationships. Generate algorithmic engagement. Maintain plausible deniability about audience age. Monetize trust. When caught, claim ignorance and move on. The platforms facilitate this by design. Parents discover the damage too late.

Your kids are being raised by strangers on the internet. That's the reality whether you like it or not. The question is whether you're going to engage with that reality or pretend it isn't happening.

Engaging means learning who these strangers are, what they're teaching, and how the parasocial dynamics work. It means building your own relationship with your child that competes successfully with algorithmic strangers who have unlimited time and sophisticated psychological engineering on their side.

It means setting boundaries that actually protect your child even when those boundaries feel impossibly difficult to enforce. It means having conversations about media literacy, parasocial relationships, and how to identify when someone is exploiting your trust for profit.

Most of all, it means being present in your child's life in ways that make your guidance more influential than strangers' entertainment. That's hard when you're competing against algorithms designed to maximize engagement. It's hard when your child has spent years developing relationships with influencers who feel like friends. It's hard when the entire culture of childhood has shifted to spaces you don't understand.

But it's necessary. Because the alternative is allowing strangers to shape your child's values, beliefs, and behaviors without oversight or accountability. The alternative is discovering years later that your child developed gambling addictions, eating disorders, or dangerous beliefs from people you never knew they were watching.

The Drake and Ross lawsuit should be a wake-up call. Not because gambling promotion is uniquely terrible, but because it reveals how normalized it has become for strangers to have unrestricted access to children through screens. How easily trust can be built and exploited. How little oversight exists. How late parents discover harm.

Your kids are being raised by strangers on the internet. The question is what you're going to do about it.

Related Reads: Drake And Adin Ross Made Millions Teaching Kids How To Develop Gambling Addictions