My Toxic Trait: Ruining a Family BBQ

By Kimberly King, M.S.Ed. — Tough Topics Mom®

I have a toxic trait. I've made peace with it, mostly, the way you make peace with a smoke detector that goes off every time you make toast. It's annoying. It's also, occasionally, the thing that saves your house.

If you're reading this and already wincing a little, like you know exactly what I'm about to describe because you've done it too, hi. Welcome. I think we're the same person.

Here's my toxic trait: I cannot watch a parent hand their kid an unsupervised phone at a birthday party without a small, involuntary noise escaping my body. It's somewhere between a gasp and a sigh. My boyfriend calls it "the sound." He can hear it from across a backyard.

Here's how it usually goes.

Between nieces, nephews, and the small army of friends' kids who call me "Aunt Kim" whether we're related or not, I've got a front-row seat to roughly a dozen kids between ages 7 and 17 at any given family gathering. So at a recent barbecue, one of them, I'll spare you which one — is quietly scrolling in the corner. A parent says, cheerfully, "Oh, that's just how kids are now. Nobody's getting hurt." And I, a woman who was invited to eat potato salad, not deliver a TED TALK, feel my whole nervous system light up like a switchboard.

I try. I really do. I make it about four minutes before I say something like:

"Did you know kids on travel baseball and basketball teams are getting specifically targeted for sextortion? Scammers literally scrape team rosters because it makes their fake accounts look legit — '20 mutual friends,' instant trust. Wait? You aren't talking about staying safe online?"

Silence. Someone refills their drink very slowly.

"Oh, unsupervised phone access? In the bedroom? At night? Are we...I'm sorry, are we doing that?"

My nephew asks if he can be excused from the table.

"I know your kids are good kids. Great kids. I'm sure they'd never look at anything like that. Except, quick, unrelated fact —did you know researchers at the University of New Hampshire's Crimes Against Children Research Center found that 93% of boys and 62% of girls are exposed to online pornography before they turn 18? Anyway, is that your famous potato salad?"

I don't know how to stop. I have genuinely tried. I have stood in kitchens biting the inside of my cheek while a well-meaning parent describes letting their eight-year-old have a phone "for emergencies" that also happens to have unrestricted internet, three social apps, and a group chat with forty kids in it. SNAPCHAT!

I nod. I smile. And then, without my permission, my mouth opens.

This is probably why my invitations have started arriving later. Or not at all. My friend group has quietly reorganized itself into "people who still invite Kim" and "people who invite Kim after the kids go to bed."

You Might Be One of Us If...

Before we go further, a little self-diagnostic: you might have this same toxic trait if:

• You've heard "kids are just like that now" and physically had to sit on your hands.
• You've turned a five-minute chat about someone's vacation photos into an unscheduled seminar on app permissions between your friends.
• You've said "I'm sure they're fine, BUT..." more than once this year.
• You've been the one who gets quiet in the group chat, then sends a very long voice memo instead.
• You know you're not actually mad at the parent. You're mad at the algorithm, the scammer, the app designer, and they're not the ones in the room, so it comes out sideways.
• You might be too opinionated on child safety.
• You've googled a statistic, mid-conversation, to make sure you weren't exaggerating before you said it out loud. (You weren't.)
• You have been slightly judgy on somebody's parenting decisions because you want to help them.

If you nodded at even two of those...same. This isn't a "here's what's wrong with other parents" post. It's a "here's what's wrong with us, the ones who can't let it go" post. We're not villains. We're just the people who read the research nobody asked us to read, at 2:00 am, and now we can't unread it.

In My Defense (Your Honor, I Have Stats and Work with Families on this topic)

Here's the thing about being the annoying prevention lady at the cookout: I'm not making any of this up. I genuinely wish I were.

Sextortion isn't rare, and it isn't random. Reports of financial sextortion tracked by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children went from 139 cases in 2021 to over 28,000 cases in 2024,  an increase of roughly 18,000% in three years. That's not a typo. That's not fear-mongering. That's a spreadsheet.

Youth athletes are a specifically attractive target. FBI investigators have noted that boys with local athletic status and a steady social media presence, the exact profile of a kid on a travel team, are appealing to overseas scam networks because of both their social reach and their desire to protect a "perfect" image for college recruiters. Scammers have openly told journalists they target entire sports team rosters at once, because a shared roster makes a fake profile look instantly trustworthy to the next kid on the list.

And it overwhelmingly targets teen boys. Investigators tracking sextortion reports have found that the vast majority of victims, reported at around 90% in some national tiplines, are young males between roughly 14 and 17, most often approached by someone posing as a romantically interested peer.

Pornography exposure isn't a "maybe, if they go looking" issue. Multiple national surveys,  including Common Sense Media's research, put the average age of first exposure at around 12, with roughly 1 in 7 kids reporting they saw it by age 10. And that's average, meaning plenty of kids see it younger.

So no. I don't think I'm the problem at the barbecue. I think I'm the smoke detector. I just haven't figured out how to be a smoke detector that people still want to sit next to. Maybe I am that smoke detector with that battery beep. You know the one that you can ignore because it chirps softly every five minutes until you replace the batteries or knock it down.

Mistakes I've Made (Yes, Even Me)

In the spirit of full disclosure, because I am insufferable but not a hypocrite: I have made every single one of the mistakes I now lecture people about.

• I let my own kids have devices in their rooms overnight before I fully understood what "overnight, unsupervised, unfiltered" actually meant. (15 Years ago)
• I assumed "he's just listening to soothing sleep sounds to help him sleep" meant scrolling on Instagram and TikTok.
• I said "my kid would never" about my own kid. Out loud. To another parent. At a party. The audacity.
• I have absolutely, 100% made tons of parenting mistakes.
• I'm not confessing this to let anyone off the hook, including myself. I'm confessing it because the judgy version of me sometimes forgets to say the actual point out loud: this isn't about perfect parents versus bad parents. It's about informed parents versus parents who just haven't seen the numbers yet. I wasn't informed either, until I was.

Things Most Parents Don't Know (That I Will Now Tell You, Unprompted, at Your Own Party)

• Predators and scammers don't need to "hack" anything. They add a kid on an app the parent didn't know they had, using a fake profile built to look like a real teenager.
• A phone that's "just for texting" is very rarely just for texting once app stores, browsers, and DMs are one tap away.
• "He's a good kid" and "he could be targeted" are not opposites. Sextortion scammers specifically prey on kids with good reputations, real social lives, and something to protect — that's what makes the threat of exposure work.
• Most porn exposure isn't a kid deliberately searching for it. It's algorithmic, accidental, and one misspelled search or shared link away, on apps that feel completely age-appropriate on the surface.
• Waiting until high school to have "the conversation" means the algorithm and the scammers already had years of uncontested access first.
• Deleting the evidence is a survival instinct, not guilt. Kids who are being sextorted often panic-delete apps or messages, which parents sometimes read as "nothing happened" instead of "something happened, and they're scared."
• A sextortion scammer only needs a few minutes. Investigators have seen cases move from first contact to blackmail threats within an hour; there often isn't a slow buildup a parent could have caught in the moment.
• Screen time limits and app blockers manage how much, not what. A kid can hit their daily limit and still have been exposed to something harmful in the ten minutes they had.
• "We're a screen-free house" doesn't mean risk-free. Kids get exposed at friends' houses, on school-issued devices, and through friends' phones passed around at sleepovers — supervision at home doesn't cover the whole picture.
• If your child gets a threatening message, the single most protective thing they can do is stop responding and tell an adult immediately. Paying, apologizing, or negotiating with a sextortionist almost never makes it stop; it tends to escalate the demands.

Things I Keep Learning (Even After 20 Years of Doing This)

I wish I could tell you I learned all of this once and now just recite it at parties from memory. The truth is, this field moves fast, and I am constantly having to update what I thought I knew.

• The platforms keep changing, and so do the tactics. A few years ago, most of what I worried about lived on obvious social apps. Now I'm learning how much exposure happens through gaming chat, AI chatbot apps, and platforms that don't read as "social media" to a parent at all.
• Kids don't tell us the way we expect them to. I used to think a kid who'd seen something disturbing would seem visibly upset. Sometimes they go quiet instead. Sometimes they get defensive. Sometimes they act completely normal for weeks. I've had to unlearn my assumptions about what distress looks like in a 9-year-old versus a 16-year-old.
• My own kids taught me I don't know as much as I think I do. Every time I'm sure I've covered something, one of them tells me about an app, a trend, or a workaround I'd never heard of. Staying current means staying humble.
• Boys and girls are targeted differently, and that keeps shifting too. The data on who's most at risk for what, financial sextortion versus other forms of exploitation, isn't static. I re-check the numbers regularly instead of assuming last year's stats still apply.
• "I already had the talk" is a myth I had to let go of. I used to think of body safety and online safety as topics you cover once and check off. I now treat it the way I'd treat any other ongoing skill, like reading or math, something we revisit constantly, not a single conversation with an end date.
• I am never surprised anymore by how low predators will go. Twenty years in, and I still think I've seen the floor of it, and then I read the next case file, and there's a new floor underneath the old one. Fake profiles built specifically to look like a classmate. Scripts designed to exploit a kid's kindness, not just their naivety. Threats aimed at younger siblings to force compliance. I used to think staying informed meant eventually reaching a point where nothing shocked me. It doesn't work that way. It just means I stop being shocked into silence, and get to work instead.

The One Tool I Actually Recommend

Here's where I put my money, and my professional reputation, where my mouth is. I serve as a Content Matter Advisor for Bark. This monitoring tool uses AI to scan a child's texts, social media, and messaging apps for signs of risk- things like predatory contact, sextortion attempts, self-harm language, and explicit content- and sends parents an alert only when something concerning comes up, rather than handing over every private conversation to read.

I recommend it not because it's flashy, but because it's built around the actual problem I keep seeing at these barbecues: parents don't need to read every text their kid sends. They need to know the moment something dangerous shows up in one. That's the gap Bark is built to close. It's not a replacement for the conversations in this post; no tool is, but it's a real safety net underneath them, especially for the platforms and messages a parent physically cannot monitor 24/7 on their own.

(Disclosure: I advise Bark on content and safety matters. I still wouldn't recommend a tool I didn't actually believe in...ask anyone who's sat next to me at a BBQ.)

Why I Can't Stop (And Why I'm Not Going To)

Here's my actual, non-sarcastic truth: I've sat with families after something went wrong. I've seen what it costs a kid to be the one it happened to, and I've seen what it costs a parent to say, "I had no idea." I would rather be the person nobody wants to sit next to at the cookout than be the person who knew the stats and said nothing because the potato salad was good and the mood was light.

So...apologies in advance to whoever invites me to a graduation party this year. I will compliment your centerpieces. I will eat your food. And somewhere around the second hour, I will probably still say the thing about baseball rosters.

That's not a threat. That's just who I am now.

And if you're the person in your friend group who does this too, who bites her tongue through three redirected conversations and then can't hold it in on the fourth, you're not the problem at the party. You're the one who read the report. Welcome to the club. The invitations get later, but the kids get safer. I think that's a fair trade.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why are kids on sports teams specifically targeted for sextortion? Scammers often use full team rosters to build fake profiles with dozens of "mutual friends," which makes the fake account look instantly trustworthy to the next athlete they target. Investigators have also noted that athletes' public social status and desire to protect their image for college recruiters make them appealing targets.

What age do most kids first see pornography? National surveys, including research from Common Sense Media, put the average age of first exposure around 12, with a meaningful percentage of kids reporting exposure by age 10 or younger, often accidentally, through social media rather than deliberate searching.

Is it safe to give my child unsupervised phone access "just for emergencies"? A phone rarely stays limited to its intended purpose once it has browser and app access. Most risk exposure, sextortion attempts, accidental porn exposure, and unmonitored DMs happen through the same device parents intended for calls or texts.

How fast has sextortion targeting teens grown? Reports of financial sextortion tracked by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children rose from 139 cases in 2021 to more than 28,000 in 2025.