Kids’ Online Safety Is a Global Problem: What Parents in the US and UK Are Seeing

You’re not imagining it. Something feels different about the internet your kid is growing up on compared to the one you knew. It’s louder, faster, and it’s in their bedroom at midnight. If you’ve ever found yourself lying awake wondering what they’re actually seeing in those group chats, you’re in very good company.

Parents in the US and the UK are asking the same questions and, it turns out, finding the same answers. Bark’s 2025 Annual Report, built from 11.1 billion activities monitored across American families, and two major studies from Internet Matters, the UK’s leading children’s online safety nonprofit, are painting a picture that looks almost identical on both sides of the Atlantic. Same apps. Same risks. Same worried parents.

Here’s what the research shows, and more importantly, what you can actually do about it.

The Internet Your Kid Is On Is Not the One You Think It Is

Most parents have a rough mental model of what their kids do online: a little social media, some gaming, maybe YouTube. The reality is a lot more sprawling. UK children now average 23 hours online per week, up from 16 hours just a few years ago (2022). That’s nearly a part-time job. And that time isn’t evenly distributed across wholesome content. It’s concentrated in group chats, comment sections, and algorithmically fed video streams that are specifically engineered to be hard to stop watching.

Internet Matters’ Children’s Wellbeing in a Digital World research found that 46% of UK kids keep watching or playing even when they’re not enjoying it anymore. Think about that for a second. Nearly half of kids can’t stop doing something they’ve stopped liking. That’s not a willpower problem. That’s a design problem. The platforms are built this way on purpose.

Bark’s data tells the same story from a different angle. Kids are communicating constantly, in places and at hours that parents don’t always know to check. The late-night DM thread. The Discord server their friend invited them to. The comment section under a video that started out totally fine.

What All That Time Online Is Actually Doing to Kids

Across the families Bark monitored in 2025, 45% of tweens and 51% of teens expressed feelings that triggered depression alerts. Nearly half of teens experienced feelings of anxiety significant enough to trigger alerts. These aren’t survey responses. These are data points pulled from what kids are actually experiencing on their devices. It includes anything from a text to a note saved in their drafts. Bark’s 2025 Annual Report caught them anyway.

Internet Matters’ research adds important texture from the UK side: kids who spend the most time online are 67% more likely to experience negative emotional wellbeing. Their Online Safety Act report, published after the UK’s new children’s safety laws came into force, specifically flags exposure to self-harm and eating disorder content as ongoing concerns, even with new regulations in place.

Bark’s numbers echo that. 37% of tweens and 64% of teens encountered content related to suicidal ideation. 34% of teens triggered disordered eating alerts. The platforms showing up most in both reports for this type of content are Reddit, TikTok, Instagram, and Tumblr.

It’s worth saying something here about what makes this data meaningful: Bark and Internet Matters are measuring completely different things. Bark sees the actual content kids are producing and consuming. Internet Matters hears directly from kids about how they experience their time online. When two methods this different land in the same place, that’s not a coincidence. That’s a real signal.

The Harmful Stuff Isn’t Hiding in the Dark Corners Anymore

A lot of parents assume that as long as their kid sticks to mainstream apps, they’re mostly safe. The data makes that a hard assumption to hold onto.

In Bark’s 2025 data, 80% of teens encountered sexual content and 84% encountered violent content. Nearly 80% of teens experienced cyberbullying, and so did 70% of tweens. These aren’t edge cases on fringe platforms. This is happening on the apps sitting on your kid’s phone right now.

Internet Matters found that 49% of UK children reported experiencing some form of online harm in the month prior to the survey, even after new safety measures under the Online Safety Act came into force. Read their full report for the details, but the headline is this: regulation helps, but it isn’t enough on its own.

The apps at the center of both reports are the same ones: Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Discord, Reddit. On both continents. The geography changes. The apps don’t.

Why Age Restrictions Aren’t Protecting Kids the Way We’d Hope

Most parents feel at least a little reassured when a platform says it’s for users 13 and up, or when a phone has parental controls turned on. The research on both sides of the Atlantic suggests that reassurance may be misplaced.

To start with, online predators are still very active. Bark’s 2025 data shows predator alerts on monitored apps are down 60% since 2021. That might sound like progress, but Bark describes it as a mirage. What’s actually happened is that predators have gotten better at moving to platforms where monitoring tools aren’t given the access they need to properly monitor activity, and where parents don’t think to look. Grooming behavior is still being flagged on Snapchat, Instagram, Discord, and Roblox. It’s just harder to see everywhere else.

Then there’s the workaround problem. Internet Matters found that 32% of UK children have bypassed age checks using methods including entering fake birthdates or using someone else’s login like a sibling or a parent. And one in six parents helped them do it, usually without thinking much about it. (If you’ve done this, no judgement. Most parents have.) However, children do understand their value: 81% of children think that being asked to prove their age before using a platform or app is more of a good thing in order to protect them from harmful content or contact. This highlights the need to educate children on why they exist, not just that they do.

There’s also a newer layer to all of this. AI-generated content is making it harder for kids and adults alike to know what’s real. Fake images, synthetic voices, videos that look completely authentic. Both Bark and Internet Matters flag this as an emerging area parents need to understand, even if they don’t have all the answers yet.

For parents who want to close the workaround gap entirely, the Bark Phone is built from the ground up with tamper-proof controls. Kids can’t find workarounds for restrictions they can’t see or access.

So What Can Parents Actually Do?

None of what’s above is meant to make you feel helpless. It’s meant to give you an accurate picture, because an accurate picture is where good decisions start.

The most important thing you can do right now doesn’t involve any tech at all: talk to your kid. Not a lecture, not a “we need to have a conversation” sit-down. Just regular, low-pressure check-ins about what they’re seeing and who they’re talking to online. Kids who feel like they can come to a parent when something goes wrong online are in a fundamentally safer position than kids who don’t. That relationship is the whole foundation.

From there, it helps to actually know the apps. The same platforms that are showing up in Bark’s US data are showing up in the UK research. If your kid is on Snapchat or Discord or TikTok, it’s worth understanding how those platforms actually work, not just that they exist.

Think about sleep and balance, not just screen time totals. Both datasets show kids staying online well into the night and skipping real-world plans to keep scrolling. The question isn’t just how many hours, it’s whether online activity is crowding out the things that actually support kids’ wellbeing: sleep, movement, face-to-face connection.

And use tools that were built for this. For US families, the Bark app monitors texts, emails, and 30-plus apps for the issues in this post. For families in the UK and beyond, Internet Matters offers free step-by-step device setup guides and platform-by-platform parental controls guidance to help you get set up quickly.

You Don’t Have to Navigate This Alone

The scale of what Bark and Internet Matters are documenting can feel overwhelming. But the through-line in all of it is the same: kids are safer when adults are paying attention, and paying attention has never been easier to do well.

Kids online safety is a global challenge now, not a niche concern for the especially tech-savvy. Every parent, on every continent, is dealing with some version of what this research describes. The fact that you’re reading this means you’re already ahead.

When you’re ready to take the next step, Bark can help provide connection without unlimited access. Explore Bark’s suite of parental control products, or take Bark’s product quiz to find the safety tool that works best for your family.