Digital Freedom

I have learned over the past few years that luck sometimes arrives disguised as something ordinary. For me, that moment came during a conversation in my car, as I drove my dear friend Maggie Dent and her husband Steve through the hills of Tuscany, just outside my adopted home of Florence, during their short stay with us last European autumn. Looking back, you realise the ground shifted right beneath your feet on a particular day, even though you never saw it in the moment.

I have spent almost twenty years in rooms where the news is rarely good. I have also sat across from parents on one of the worst days of their lives. I have read the messages no child should ever have to receive and traced the same dark patterns across eighteen countries and more than a thousand schools, until I could feel them coming the way you feel a change of weather deep in your bones. It is work that can hollow a person out, and for a long time, I believed the only response to it was to stay sharp. Stay vigilant. Stay ahead of the worst of what can happen online.

And then I sat down to write a book with a woman whose whole life is a quiet argument for the opposite.

Maggie is, by national agreement, Australia’s Queen of Common Sense, and she has earned every letter of that title. But what the title doesn’t tell you is how it feels to be in her orbit. Writing with Maggie is like learning to breathe out after years of breathing in only. Where I arrive with the evidence, the case files, the architecture of harm, the deep technical understanding, she arrives with something I had nearly forgotten how to hold, and that is the hope and the unshakeable belief that families are not the problem to be solved but the answer we keep overlooking.

Digital Freedom is the book I wish I’d been able to hand to every parent who ever asked me, eyes wide with worry, but what do I actually do? It is not a panic or a lecture. It does not wag a finger at the phone in a child’s hand. It sits down at the kitchen table with you and talks straight about when and how to give a child their first phone, about how algorithms and digital footprints and AI really work beneath the shiny surface, about what to do on the night your child comes to you frightened, exploited, or ashamed. It is, above all, a book about how to stay close to your children through all of it, how to be their harbour, and not their enemy.

That, in the end, is what Maggie taught me over the months we spent shaping these pages. I came to the table believing my job was to protect children from the internet. She gently turned me around until I could see the larger truth that the work is really about protecting childhood itself. The mucking about. The boredom. The long, unsupervised afternoons in which a person quietly becomes themselves.

I grew up in Byron Bay on the beach, in the years before any of this. My father is gone now, and my Mum is not my Mum so much anymore as dementia takes over, but I still measure things against the childhood they gave me — the beach, the freedom, the safety, the space and the room to wander and wonder. Some part of why I do this work has always been a wish to hand that same freedom forward, to children born into a world that monetises their attention before they can spell their own names. Writing this book with Maggie, I finally found the words for it. Digital freedom was never about keeping kids off their screens. It was about giving them back the open afternoon.

My dearest Maggie, thank you. For your generosity, your laughter, and your common sense that turned out to be the rarest sense of all. Working with you has been one of the great pleasures of my professional life, and one of the quiet gifts of my personal one.

Digital Freedom: A Guide to Less Screen Time for Safer, Happier and Healthier Families, by Maggie Dent and Kirra Pendergast, publishes with Macmillan Australia on 18 August 2026 and is available now for pre-order by clicking here