Parenting & Family Quote by Mike Fitzpatrick

The line lands like a parental warning delivered at the exact moment the internet stopped feeling like a novelty and started feeling like a neighborhood. Mike Fitzpatrick isn’t trying to be lyrical; he’s trying to be undeniable. “Any way” is the lever here, a totalizing phrase that turns discrete platforms into one continuous risk surface. By listing Myspace, instant messaging, and online games, he’s mapping a then-new truth: kids don’t experience the internet as “sites,” they experience it as social life. Predators, he argues, will follow that social life wherever it migrates.

The intent is legislative as much as moral. A politician invokes “children” and “predators” because it compresses complexity into a binary no one wants to be caught soft on. The subtext is permission: permission for surveillance, for regulation, for school and parental control to expand into digital spaces. Notice what’s absent: privacy, youth agency, the fact that “online” is not a single place. The threat is individualized (a predator) rather than systemic (platform incentives, weak moderation, data extraction). That choice matters: it points public anger at villains instead of business models.

Contextually, “Myspace” dates the quote to the mid-2000s panic-and-policy cycle, when social networking went mainstream and “stranger danger” got a broadband upgrade. It works rhetorically because it weaponizes platform ubiquity: if the threat can appear in messages, profiles, and games, then nowhere feels safely “just for fun.” The sentence doesn’t merely warn; it redraws the map of childhood itself, insisting that play and vulnerability now share the same screen.