1. Introduction
Digitisation has not only multiplied the risks minors face online (from harmful content to behavioural profiling and addictive design) it has profoundly reshaped the role traditionally assigned to parental responsibility (Livingstone & Byrne, 2018). Parents are increasingly asked to supervise environments that are technologically opaque, fast-changing, and designed by actors with commercial rather than educational incentives (Fortuna & Patti, 2025). Faced with this challenge, legal systems have not converged on a single model. A comparative look at the United Kingdom, Italy and Australia shows three markedly different ways of allocating responsibility between parents, platforms and the state, each reflecting a distinct idea of what parental control is for.
2. A common (thin) baseline
Before examining the points of divergence, it is useful to identify the common international framework shared by all three jurisdictions. As States Parties to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC, 1989), the United Kingdom, Italy and Australia endorse a common understanding of child protection based on three interrelated principles: the primary responsibility of parents for the child’s upbringing and development, the corresponding duty of States to support them in fulfilling that responsibility, and the progressive recognition of the child’s autonomy.
This normative framework is reflected in the combined reading of Articles 5 and 18 CRC. Article 18 entrusts parents with the primary responsibility for the upbringing and development of the child, while requiring States to provide appropriate assistance in the performance of that role. Article 5 complements this allocation of responsibilities by requiring parental guidance to be exercised in accordance with the child’s evolving capacities, thereby ensuring that protective measures remain proportionate to the child’s maturity and progressively expanding ability to exercise his or her rights.
General Comment No. 25 (General Comment No. 25 (2021) on children’s rights in relation to the digital environment, paras. 19-21) carries these principles into the digital environment. It clarifies that children’s online protection should likewise be calibrated according to their evolving capacities and emphasises the role of States in supporting parents through digital literacy initiatives while promoting digital services that are designed to respect children’s rights. This shared international framework constitutes the common point of departure from which the different national and regional approaches subsequently diverge.
At EU level, the Digital Services Act embeds this logic only generically: Very Large Online Platforms must factor systemic risks to minors into their risk assessments and offer tools such as age-verification and parental controls, but the Regulation neither defines these tools in detail nor clarifies what role parents are actually expected to play (Digital Services Act, arts. 28, 34 and 35; recitals 81 and 89; Fortuna, 2025).
3. United Kingdom: embedding transparency into design
The United Kingdom offers a particularly clear example of a design-oriented approach. The Age-Appropriate Design Code, or Children’s Code, issued by the Information Commissioner’s Office in 2020, applies to online services “likely to be accessed by children”, including content and streaming platforms (Information Commissioner’s Office, Age Appropriate Design: A Code of Practice for Online Services, 2020). Anchored in the best interests of the child as a primary consideration, the Code requires service providers to place children’s rights at the centre of design choices rather than treating protection as a matter to be addressed only through parental supervision (ICO, Children’s Code, Standard 1; Fortuna & Patti, 2025, par. 7.1).
Standard 11 is especially relevant in this respect. It addresses parental controls directly, requiring providers to explain such tools to children in an age-appropriate manner and to give them an “obvious sign” whenever parental monitoring or tracking is active. This provision reflects a deliberately limited and transparent understanding of parental control. Such tools may support children’s protection, but they cannot replace safety-by-design obligations resting on platforms themselves, nor can they justify shifting responsibility for children’s online safety onto families.
The impact assessment of the Children’s Code confirms this rationale. It warns that expanding parental controls without adequate transparency may undermine children’s autonomy, place undue pressure on parents, strain parent-child relationships and divert attention from the structural safeguards that platforms are required to provide (J. Mootz, K. Blocker et al, 2024; S. Rigazio, 2024, p. 138 ff.). In this sense, the UK model treats parents not as the primary line of defence, but as participants in a multilayered framework of responsibility, operating within a transparent design architecture that must remain consistent with children’s rights and evolving capacities.
In other words, the UK model treats parents as co-regulators operating within a transparent architecture, not as the primary line of defence (Grimes et al., 2023).
4. Italy: responsibilising and protecting against parents
Italy has no single statute dedicated to minors’ digital vulnerability; protection is scattered across data-protection law, the Caivano Decree (D.L. 123/2023) and a cluster of pending bills. Four bills merged for parliamentary examination (A.C. 1217, 1771, 1800, 1863) and a further proposal (A.C. 1136) illustrate a genuinely dual approach.
On the one hand, these bills strengthen parental responsibility. Bill 1217 raises the age of valid “digital consent” from 14 to 15 and makes access to electronic communication services carrying heightened risks for minors under 13 unlawful altogether, while allowing joint parental consent for 13-15 year-olds (A.C. 1217, Art. 1). Bill 1136 requires device manufacturers to pre-install parental control applications, activatable free of charge at first use, and personal data generated by their activation cannot be exploited commercially (A.C. 1136, Art. 2.). Most strikingly, Article 3 of Bill 1136 provides that contracts for information-society services concluded by minors under fifteen are null, unless validly authorised by whoever holds parental responsibility, a stronger remedy than the ordinary voidability the Italian Civil Code reserves for contracts entered into by minors (A.C. 1136, Art. 3; cf. Art. 1425 of the Italian Civil Code; Vizzoni, 2025, p. 100).
On the other hand, and this is the distinctive Italian contribution, the same bills recognise that parents can themselves be a source of risk. Article 5 of bills 1136 and 1863 addresses the phenomena of baby influencers and sharenting: where a minor’s image is diffused on a platform generating (directly or indirectly) more than €10,000 per year, authorisation from the provincial labour directorate is required, and revenues above that threshold must be paid into an account in the minor’s own name, off-limits to the parent exercising parental responsibility except in judicially authorised emergencies (A.C. 1136 and 1863, Art. 5). The Italian model, in short, does not simply hand parents more tools; it also builds safeguards against the parent, acknowledging that economic exploitation of a child’s digital image is a real and growing risk.
5. Australia: taking the decision away from parents altogether
Australia has taken the most radical route. The Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2024 sets a minimum age of 16 for holding a social media account — not as a default requiring parental consent to lower, but as an outright prohibition that removes parental discretion from the equation entirely (Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2024, inserting Part 4A into the Online Safety Act 2021, s. 63B). The obligation to prevent underage account creation falls on platforms, which must adopt “reasonable steps” and verifiable age-assurance systems; civil penalties for non-compliance can reach AUD 49.5 million (Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2024, Explanatory Memorandum, p. 6; Division 2, s. 63D). Significantly, no sanction attaches to the minor who circumvents the restriction, nor to their parents (Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2024, Explanatory Memorandum, p. 2).
The Explanatory Memorandum is candid about the reasoning: parents “feel unsupported to make evidence-based choices” about when children should join social media, with 95% of caregivers reporting that children’s online safety is “the hardest parenting challenge they face” (Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2024, Explanatory Memorandum, p. 2). Rather than equip parents further, the Australian legislator concluded that removing the decision altogether (and reallocating both the burden and the liability to platforms) better serves the child’s best interests under Article 3 CRC (Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2024, Explanatory Memorandum, p. 10). This is a deresponsabilising model: parental judgment is bypassed, and the online risk-management function migrates almost entirely to the corporate sphere.
6. Three philosophies, one unresolved tension
Placed side by side, the three jurisdictions embody three different answers to the same question: what should parental control achieve?
- The UK treats it as a transparency mechanism nested inside safety-by-design: parents get tools, but so does the child, in the form of visibility over how they are monitored.
- Italy treats it as a two-way accountability mechanism: parents are given stronger instruments (mandatory apps, consent thresholds, contractual nullity) but are also subject to new constraints when their own conduct, sharenting, or commercial exploitation of a child-influencer becomes a risk.
- Australia treats it as an unreliable variable to be removed from the equation, shifting both discretion and liability onto platforms.
Comparative research on parental mediation styles offers a useful lens for evaluating these choices. Restrictive mediation reliably reduces children’s exposure to risk, but also reduces the opportunities they can access online; enabling mediation, such as dialogue, co-use, and transparent technical tools, tends to build resilience but requires digital skills and time that not all parents possess (Livingstone & Byrne, 2018, pp. 22–23).
None of the three legal models fully escapes this trade-off: the UK code risks relying on a digital literacy many parents lack; the Italian bills risk over-formalising family life through nullity and administrative authorisation; the Australian ban risks infantilising an entire cohort of 13-to-15-year-olds regardless of their individual maturity, arguably in tension with the evolving-capacities principle it claims to serve.
7. Conclusion
None of these systems, taken alone, resolves the underlying tension between protection and autonomy. What emerges instead is the outline of a genuinely shared-responsibility model: platforms bound by default-protective, safety-by-design obligations; States investing in parents’ and children’s digital literacy rather than merely mandating technical tools; and parental control conceived not as a static barrier but as guided empowerment — a family-level safeguard that complements, rather than substitutes for, public and technological ones (Fortuna & Patti, 2025, par. 7). Transnational harmonisation remains difficult because the UK, Italy and Australia are not merely choosing different tools: they are expressing different judgments about how much trust the law should place in parents navigating an ecosystem that, as recent research confirms, increasingly outpaces parents’ own digital competence (Livingstone & Byrne, 2018, p. 27; Fortuna, 2025, § 6).
