The advice to log off or return only with greater media literacy is wise counsel for all parents. Social media and screen use have for too long felt like a corrosive inevitability for too many families.

What of the parental controls that tech companies tout? Many families don’t use them: One in 6, according to a 2019 poll conducted by the University of Michigan’s C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital. And even when parents do try to gate the internet and social media, children find such controls easy to evade.

As a result, kids growing up with smartphones in their pockets happen upon dreadful things. They might be fed pictures of Islamic State beheadings or propaganda videos designed to evoke video games such as “Call of Duty” and “Grand Theft Auto” by the YouTube algorithm. TikTok has struggled to suppress content as disturbing as a recording of a live-streamed suicide. And as Elon Musk has pulled back on moderation of posts on X, formerly known as Twitter, and upended its verification system, the site has been overrun this week with photos and videos of violence in Israel — not all of it real.

Children have long reported being disturbed by violent content on the internet. In a 2014 survey of 10,000 European kids ages 9 to 16, almost one-fifth indicated that encountering violence online upset them, nearly as many as cited cyberbullying and pornography. The researchers noted that violent content receives less attention than sexual content or bullying in awareness-raising initiatives.

That was almost a decade ago. These days, more kids have phones, and get them at ever younger ages. In a 2020 survey of European children, 13 percent reported seeing “gory or violent” images online at least once a month, second in frequency only to hateful messaging. This year, in a pulse survey from Boston Children’s Hospital’s Digital Wellness Lab, more than one-quarter of teenagers said they had reported violent content to platforms.

The Jewish educators who are now alerting parents to the dangers of social media have special cause to be concerned. As Rabbi Ed Gelb, the chief executive of the camp network Ramah New England, warned in an email to parents, the Palestinian militant group Hamas might leverage social media algorithms to try to deliver appalling footage of hostages directly to Jewish and Israeli users.

The advice these leaders are offering their school communities about internet use applies to all of us with children in our care. Parents setting limits on social media and internet use should explain to kids old enough to understand that there is some information that is better encountered by choice than by chance, and with proper mental preparation.

Part of that preparation is to help children understand the difference between bearing witness and having their attention and emotions hijacked. “The videos and testimonies we are currently exposed to are bigger and crueler than our souls can contain,” wrote Frisch School principal Rabbi Eli Ciner, relaying to his student and parent community what a local psychologist had told him. That’s true of videos documenting the suffering of civilians in Gaza as well.

Parents might put it to their children more simply: It’s important to know about what’s happening in the world but there is a difference between gathering information and deliberately upsetting yourself to no end. For a teen, say, reading a carefully written account of the attack on the Tribe of Nova music festival might convey more information in a more manageable fashion than watching individual clips of the attack out of context.

Similarly, learning more about George Floyd’s life and the history of policing in Minneapolis will do more to prepare young people to think clearly about racism and reform than simply watching Floyd’s 2020 murder on repeat.

Perhaps most of all, parents should talk with their children about their online lives, just as they do about their friends or what they do when they’re away from home. Sonia Livingstone, a social media expert at the London School of Economics, suggests asking them: “What makes you feel good after you’ve watched it? What leads you to have some imaginative or creative ideas or to feel more at peace with yourself?” The conversation needs to go deeper than just saying: How long have you been on that thing?

Protecting kids from a new wave of sickening violence on their screens is an immediate imperative. It is also the first step toward preparing them to live safe, self-determined lives online.