Resources explained: Parents & Caregivers Guide

Netflix's "Adolescence" is a reminder that children can be exposed to harmful content online right in their homes.

By Pasha Dashtgard

The Netflix show Adolescence was recommended to me four times in the span of three hours one day. None of the people knew each other, but they did know that I work in the world of masculinity, online radicalization, and extremism. So I basically got strong-armed into watching it.

It’s a four-part series detailing a young man’s decent into male supremacist ideology, examining how violence affects the victim and their loved ones, the perpetrator and their loved ones, and the community that they both call home. One of the moments in the show that really struck me was when the parents were talking to each other, trying to make sense of their sons’ violence. There’s a scene in which they are discussing their son spending so much of his time in his room, alone, on the computer, and they they thought he was safe in there. They thought their son was safe because he wasn’t out with the neighborhood kids, running around. They thought he was safe because he was in their house. It is a chilling sentiment in part because it’s one that most parents understand. You can appreciate their reasoning. You can empathize with these parents who thought that they had been keeping their son safe, only to find out that he was being pulled into a world of hatred, toxicity, and grievance—all while upstairs in his bedroom. This is reality for so many children and so many parents.

What is the problem?

Young people are being exposed to harmful online content now more than ever. It is easy to stumble across a video, a post, a meme, or an online forum that defends hateful conspiracy theories, promotes white supremacist or male supremacist ideas, or endorses violence as the only solution to political problems. Parents who are unaware of or naive about the ease with which their children can be exposed to this kind of media can also reflexively deny that this is even a problem worth considering, and often find the whole topic terrifying to even think about. But PERIL’s approach reflects that adage that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” The work of preventing radicalization does not need to be intimidating, nor does it reflect some failure on the part of parents and caregivers to adequately protect their children. Everyone with an internet connection needs to know this information. And anyone who has a young person in their life that they are in charge of loving and protecting should be equipped with the knowledge and skills necessary to talk about online harms and what children are being exposed to.

What is the Parents & Caregivers Guide?

PERIL’s Parents & Caregivers Guide is meant for any parent or custodial caregiver in the life of a child. Parents and caregivers are the first line of defense against radicalization because they see the child regularly, they know what a change looks like from normal to abnormal behavior for that child, and they often have the power to dictate what kind of content the child is allowed to consume. PERIL’s philosophy for preventing radicalization among youth centers a concept with an origin rooted in mental health treatment: continuity of care. In this case, having a throughline from the home to the school to the mental health practitioner’s office is critical to building resilience to radicalizing content among youth. Parents, teachers, and therapists (if necessary) all have to understand the nature of radicalization, the red flags and warning signs to look out for, and what strategies are most effective for engaging young people who have been exposed to hateful content and extremist propaganda.

To that end, this guide contains definitions of terms related to radicalization, how the internet and social media platforms promote and disseminate radicalizing content, what are warning signs to look out for, what factors or vulnerabilities make someone more likely to radicalize or seek out this kind of toxic content, and what to do and where to go if you suspect a child in your life is falling down the rabbit hole of hate and extremism. While this guide isn’t the panacea for all that ails the digital world, we have seen through testing the impact of this resource on parents and primary caregivers that even a few minutes spent reading this guide can confer knowledge, confidence, and a willingness to engage with young people in their life on the topic of online radicalization.

Does it work?

The short answer is a resounding yes! This guide works. This guide helps parents and caregivers understand the problem and makes them feel like they can be part of the solution. A (slightly) longer answer is that 1,500 parents and custodial caregivers were tested every three months for a full year from November 2022 to November 2023 to determine how this resource impacts awareness and knowledge of extremism, as well as caregivers’ capacity, capability, confidence, and willingness to intervene in the life of a child possibly exposed to radicalizing content online. And what we found over the course of a year was nothing short of incredible.

Parents’ knowledge of specific terms related to online radicalization saw an almost 50% increase, their ability to accurately remember the contents of the guide rose by almost 15% percent, and their willingness to intervene in the process of online radicalization saw an almost 11% increase. After reading the guide, 12% of parents either joined or created a group dedicated to monitoring youth radicalization, and by the end of the study 303 parents actually used information from the guide to prevent youth in their life from being recruited to an extremist group. This is real impact. This is actual parents helping their actual children resist recruitment into groups that espouse hate speech and supremacist ideologies. We also found out that parenting style impacts how willing a parent is to discuss these kinds of topics with their children. Parents who scored higher on the authoritative parenting style (high expectations combined with warmth and responsiveness) had a stronger tendency to intervene in the process of youth radicalization than those who scored higher on authoritarian parenting style (strict rules with little warmth or flexibility) and permissive parenting style (high warmth but few boundaries or consistent expectations).

How does this guide fit within the broader approach to preventing radicalization?

PERIL envisions a world in which any trusted adult in the life of a child has the knowledge and skills necessary to prevent radicalization before it occurs—that includes parents, teachers, mental health practitioners, sports coaches, librarians, religious leaders, small business owners, and anyone else who plausibly could recognize the red flags of radicalization before it’s too late.

The Parents & Caregivers Guide is part of PERIL’s broader public health approach to preventing radicalization. This approach has PERIL develop resources in response to an identified community need (i.e. community-centered); treat the whole person and the whole society, rather than trying to decide between targeting parents and kids at home or students and teachers at school, or practitioners and clients in the office (i.e. holistic); is rigorously tested to ensure that it is actually effective, and that we understand for whom it is effective, and what are the mechanisms by which this resource or intervention produces change (i.e. evidence-based); and understands that by fixing the systems and structures of a society, we create environments in which extremism is less likely to take root and spread in the first place (i.e. prioritizes system-level change).

Pasha Dashtgard is the director of research for Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL) at American University.

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