Short answer: Supporting working parents means solving two problems, not one. Most employers solve the first, which is time: flexible hours, hybrid working, better leave. Almost none solve the second, which is the mental load of raising a child in a digital world nobody has trained them for. That second problem is the one that follows a parent into the working day.
In short:
- Flexible working fixes the school run. It does not fix a parent worrying about what their eleven-year-old saw on a group chat at lunchtime.
- Working parents lose focus at work to a specific, nameable thing: not knowing what is safe, and having nowhere to ask.
- The digital side of parenting changes every few months, which is why one-off advice goes stale and continuous support does not.
- Employers who cover this stand out, because almost nobody else does.
- It costs less than most wellbeing spending, and parents actually turn up to it.
What does supporting working parents usually mean?
Ask most organisations what they do for parents on staff and the same list comes back. Flexible hours. Hybrid or home working. Enhanced parental leave. A parents’ network. Perhaps help with childcare costs.
Every one of those is worth having. The charity Working Families has spent years making the case for exactly these measures, and employers who ignore them lose good people.
But look at what the list has in common. It all addresses time and money. Where a parent needs to be, when they need to be there, and what it costs them.
That is one half of the job.
| What employers usually offer | What it solves | What it leaves untouched |
|---|---|---|
| Flexible or hybrid hours | The school run, appointments, sick days | What the child does with the hours the parent is working |
| Enhanced parental leave | The first year | Ages seven to sixteen, when phones arrive |
| Childcare support | The cost of cover for younger children | Older children who need no childcare and far more supervision |
| A parents’ network | Isolation, and a place to compare notes | Expertise. Twelve worried parents in a room still do not know the answer |
| An employee assistance line | Crisis, counselling, acute distress | The ordinary daily question: is this app safe for a nine-year-old? |
Read the right-hand column and a pattern appears. The gap is not care. Employers care. The gap is that nothing on the standard list touches the part of modern parenting that generates the most worry.
Why supporting working parents has a digital gap
A parent of a nine-year-old in 2026 faces questions their own parents never faced, and faces them without training, without warning, and usually at ten at night.
Their child asks for a phone. Another child in the class has one. A game their child plays has a chat function, and strangers use it. An AI chatbot has started talking to their twelve-year-old like a friend. Something appeared on a feed that the parent cannot unsee, and the child saw it first.
None of that has an obvious answer. So the parent searches. They read four articles that contradict each other, ask a friend who knows no more than they do, and go to bed unresolved.
Then they log on the next morning.
This is the part employers miss, and it is measurable in the things wellbeing teams already track. Distraction. Presenteeism. The employee who is at their desk and not really there. Kids n Clicks built its support for corporate organisations around this exact problem, because it kept coming up from the parent side long before HR teams named it.
What are working parents actually carrying?
It helps to be concrete about it. Below is what comes up again and again from parents, and how each one lands on the working day.
| What the parent is dealing with | How it shows up at work |
|---|---|
| A group chat where their child is being frozen out | Checking their phone all morning in case the school calls |
| A new app the whole year group joined last week | Twenty minutes lost to searching, and no clearer answer at the end |
| A child who will not come off a game and will not say why | An argument before work that runs in the background all day |
| A stranger messaging their child inside a game | Real fear, handled alone, usually without telling anyone at work |
| An AI companion their teenager talks to daily | A worry the parent cannot even describe, so does not raise |
| Screen time arguments every single evening | Arriving at work already tired of conflict |
Notice the last column. Almost none of it gets reported. A parent will tell their manager about a hospital appointment. They will not say they were up until midnight reading about a chat app, because it sounds like they cannot cope.
So the cost stays invisible, and an invisible cost never gets budgeted for.
What can employers put in place?
Four things work, and they work in this order.
Name it. The cheapest move is to say out loud that digital parenting is a wellbeing issue and not a private failure. Parents stop hiding it. That alone changes what your networks talk about.
Bring in expertise rather than a forum. Parents comparing notes is comfort. Parents hearing from someone who tracks these platforms professionally is help. The two are not the same thing, and only the second one answers the question.
Make it continuous, not annual. A talk in October is out of date by February. Platforms change, apps arrive, trends move. Support that updates is worth several times a single session.
Cover the ages people forget. Most family policy stops around age five. Most digital worry starts around age nine and peaks in the teens.
How do you tell whether supporting working parents is working?
Wellbeing spending gets cut when nobody can say what it did. These are worth watching, and none of them need a new system.
| What to look at | What a good result looks like |
|---|---|
| Attendance at parent-focused sessions | Higher than your other wellbeing sessions, and repeat attenders |
| Questions asked during and after | Volume, and how specific they get over time |
| Your engagement survey, parent responses | Movement on questions about support and mental load |
| Uptake across seniority | Senior staff attending signals it is safe to admit the worry |
| What the parents’ network discusses | Shifting from venting to practical questions |
One caution worth holding. Do not expect a change in sickness absence figures. This is not that kind of problem. It shows up in attention, and in whether people feel their employer understands their actual life.
What organisations tend to miss on the digital side
Three things come up almost every time an employer starts looking at this properly.
The first is age. Programmes get designed for parents of babies, because that is when leave and childcare matter most. The heaviest digital worry sits with parents of nine to sixteen year olds, who have long since stopped being treated as a group with needs.
The second is that fathers and non-primary carers are missing from the room. Parent support gets quietly framed as something for mothers, and half the affected staff never come.
The third is that generic online safety advice does not land. “Talk to your child” and “set boundaries” is not information. Parents need to know how a specific platform works, what it does by default, and what to actually change.
Supporting working parents properly means treating the digital side with the same seriousness as the childcare side. It is the half nobody has covered yet, which is exactly why it is worth covering.
Our training programmes cover this properly for employers: how the platforms your employees’ children use actually work, what genuinely puts a child at risk and what merely sounds alarming, and how a parent handles the conversation without a row.
The session teaches the technology, not parenting theory. Parents already love their children. What often goes missing is a clear read of what is actually happening on the phones, the apps and the accounts, and that is the gap this session fills. It is a specialist session, delivered online or in person, to a whole workforce or to a parents’ network.
If you lead people, wellbeing or inclusion in your organisation, connect with Parven on LinkedIn or explore our training programmes to book a session for your team.
Parven Kaur is a digital parenting and online safety expert, and the founder of Kids n Clicks. She works with employers to support working parents and carers on the technology side of family life. She won the Scottish Cyber Security Award, and she sits on the National Board of Advisors for Barnardo’s Scotland.
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