At first glance, the phrase seems almost harmless. A teenager hears it from a stranger in a gaming chat room, a reassuring voice in a world of parental disappointment. 'Your parents never say good enough, do they?' It is a question that has appeared with alarming frequency in online grooming cases, and safeguarding officials are now warning that it represents a deliberate, calculated strategy. The manipulation is subtle but devastating: the groomer positions themselves as the only person who truly understands, the only one who offers the unconditional acceptance that a young person craves.
This is not a new phenomenon, but its prevalence has intensified in the wake of the pandemic, when young people spent more time online and family dynamics were strained. Child protection experts report that grooming narratives increasingly exploit real or perceived fractures in parent-child relationships. The groomer’s empathy is a trap. They identify a child’s loneliness, their sense of not measuring up, and they mirror it back as validation. ‘I see you,’ they seem to say, ‘I know you are special, even if your parents don’t.’
The phrase itself is a masterclass in emotional manipulation. It is not overtly cruel; it does not accuse the parents of abuse. Instead, it insinuates, it plants a seed of doubt. For a child who has indeed felt the sting of a parent’s high expectations, or the silence of a parent too busy to notice, the words land like a key turning in a lock. The groomer then becomes the confidant, the ally, the one who fills the emotional void. From there, the path to exploitation is horrifyingly short.
What is striking about this pattern is how it reflects a broader cultural shift in parenting and emotional expression. In an era of helicopter parenting and relentless achievement pressure, many children grow up absorbing a message that they are never quite enough. The online groomer simply leverages this existing insecurity. They do not create the wound; they merely press on it.
Safeguarding officials are now urging parents to be more explicit in their praise, to use the words ‘good enough’ and mean them. It sounds simple, almost absurdly so. But the evidence suggests that a child who hears genuine, unconditional affirmation at home is less vulnerable to the counterfeit version offered by a predator. The tragedy is that many parents believe they are already doing this. Yet in practice, praise is often conditional: ‘Well done on the A, but why not an A*?’ or ‘You played well, but you could have passed more.’ The child learns that approval is a moving target.
The online environment magnifies this. In a world of likes, shares, and instant feedback, a child can find a hundred strangers who say ‘good job’ while their parents are silent. Social media has commodified validation, and groomers are adept at exploiting that marketplace. They offer a premium version: not just ‘good job’ but ‘you are perfect just as you are, and I understand you better than anyone.’
This is the human cost of a digital age that has outpaced our emotional literacy. We have taught children to navigate screens but not to recognise the subtle language of exploitation. We have warned them about strangers in cars but not about the stranger who asks, ‘Do your parents ever say they are proud of you?’
The solution is not to lock children away from the internet, but to arm them with a deep, unshakeable sense of their own worth. It is for parents to say ‘I love you’ without a qualifier, to praise effort over outcome, and to create a home where ‘good enough’ is the baseline, not the exception. It is for society to recognise that this crisis is not just about predators; it is about the emotional vacuum that too many young people experience and that some are all too willing to fill with poison.
