The baby boomer generation is the first to enter its most vulnerable years with unfettered access to the internet and, like the rest of us, it has trouble looking away. Americans over 60 now spend more than half their leisure hours in front of screens. But unlike millennials and most Gen-Xers, who have spent years navigating engagement bait, stealth marketing, and AI slop — and have developed a working instinct for what to trust — older adults tend to have little idea of what they’re looking at. This susceptibility is creating an entirely new type of responsibility for the adult children of these suddenly very online parents. These adult children describe watching their relatives — call them iPad parents — ingest content they have no context for, slipping into a zombified state of consumption that their loved ones often believe is exacerbating their decline. “It seems like an addiction,” says Beth, a 51-year-old lawyer, who says she has watched her 84-year-old mother’s attention span atrophy over the past few years. “It kind of has the same symptoms — getting fussy if she’s not online or just constantly going back to try and get online.” Marti DeLiema, a gerontologist at the University of Minnesota, likens the process of regulating a parent’s internet access to getting an adult to give up driving in their later years. “Driving is part of your identity. It’s like a mark of freedom and independence,” she says. The online world is “also a source of your social connection.” All this amounts to a particularly tricky balancing act for adult children: figuring out how to preserve their parents’ independence while protecting them from an ever-advancing slop-filled ecosystem. Read Jessica Lucas’s report on how adult children now have to save their retired parents from slop-filled, scam-riddled feeds: nymag.visitlink.me/FQ9dBi