Let me paint you a picture. Your twelve-year-old has 847 followers on TikTok. They've spent hundreds of hours creating content, building an audience, developing their voice. They're proud of it. You're proud of them.

But here's what they don't understand yet: They own exactly none of it.

That account? It's rented space on someone else's platform. The algorithm changes tomorrow, their reach disappears. The platform decides they violated some vague community guideline, account gone. TikTok gets banned (again), everything they built vanishes overnight.

We're raising an entire generation of digital sharecroppers. Kids who spend their most creative years building value on platforms that can, and will, change the rules whenever it suits them.

There's a better way. And it starts with a $12 domain name.

Digital Real Estate: The Concept Your Kids Need to Understand

I explain it to my boys like this: Social media is like renting an apartment. A domain name is like owning land.

When you rent, the landlord makes the rules. They can raise the rent. They can change what you're allowed to do. They can kick you out. You're building nothing permanent.

When you own the land, you decide what gets built there. You control who comes in. You set the terms. Whatever you build, you keep.

boonetheiler.com will exist as long as Boone wants it to exist. His TikTok account exists only as long as ByteDance decides it should.

This isn't anti-social-media. Social platforms are tools, use them. But they should drive traffic to something you own, not replace ownership entirely.

Think of it this way: Instagram is the billboard. Your domain is the business.

Why Start at 10 (or Earlier)?

Most parents think websites are for adults with businesses. That's industrial-age thinking. In the digital age, identity is infrastructure. And the earlier you start building it, the stronger the foundation.

Here's what happens when a kid starts their own site at 10:

  • Compound growth of content. By the time they're applying to colleges at 17, they have seven years of documented growth, projects, and thinking. That's not a resume, that's a portfolio with depth.
  • Digital literacy through doing. They learn HTML, maybe some CSS. They understand hosting, DNS, the actual infrastructure of the internet. This isn't coding bootcamp, it's practical knowledge that compounds.
  • Ownership mindset. They internalize that they can build things they control. This psychological shift, from consumer to creator, from renter to owner, pays dividends in every domain of life.
  • Low-stakes learning. A ten-year-old's website can be rough. Nobody expects polish. They get to experiment, fail, iterate, and improve before the stakes get real.

The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is now. The same applies to your kid's digital presence.

The Practical Setup: How to Do This

Let's get tactical. Here's how you actually set up a kid's first domain, step by step.

Step 1: Choose the Domain Name

First choice: FirstnameLastname.com. Simple, professional, timeless. If it's taken, try variations: adding a middle initial, using .me or .io, or getting creative with something meaningful.

Make this a conversation, not a directive. Let your kid have input. It's their digital home, they should feel ownership from day one.

Cost: $10-15 per year. That's it. Less than one month of whatever streaming service they're using.

Step 2: Start Simple

You don't need WordPress. You don't need a fancy website builder. Start with a single HTML page. Literally just text on a screen.

Why? Because learning the basics matters. Understanding that a website is just files on a computer that other computers can read, that's foundational knowledge. Most kids (and most adults) have no idea how any of this actually works.

Free hosting options: GitHub Pages, Cloudflare Pages, Netlify. All free, all reliable, all teach real skills.

Step 3: Decide What Goes On It

This is where it gets fun. The site should reflect who they are right now, with room to grow. Some ideas:

  • An "About Me" page. Who are they? What are they into? This will be hilarious to read in ten years, and that's part of the point.
  • A projects section. What are they building? Learning? Working on? Could be Lego builds, drawings, Minecraft creations, hockey stats, book reviews, anything.
  • A blog or journal. Doesn't have to be regular. Just a place to write things down.
  • Links to their other stuff. This is where social profiles go, as links FROM the hub, not as the hub itself.

The key: Start with something. Anything. A blank domain does nothing. A single page that says "Hi, I'm [Name], I'm 10, I like dinosaurs and soccer" is infinitely better than perfection that never ships.

Step 4: Make It a Family Project

Don't just hand this off to your kid and walk away. Build it together. This is bonding time that teaches real skills.

Sit down together. Pick the domain together. Write the first content together. Learn together. When you don't know how to do something, figure it out together.

This is how you model the problem-solving mindset. Not "I'll ask an adult to do it" but "Let's figure out how this works."

Schedule a monthly "website night" to update it together. Make it ritual. Make it matter.

Future-Proofing: Why This Matters When They're 18

Let's talk about the long game.

College Applications: Every admissions officer will Google your kid. What do they find? A curated personal website with years of documented growth, projects, and thinking? Or a locked Instagram and some random search results? The former tells a story. The latter is noise.

First Job: They're 22, applying for jobs. Their competition has a resume. Your kid has a resume AND a portfolio website showing eight years of evolution, projects, and proof of what they can do. That's differentiation that's almost impossible to fake.

Personal Brand: Whether they become an entrepreneur, artist, engineer, or anything else, owning their name online gives them a platform nobody can take away. As AI makes generic content worthless, authentic personal presence becomes the only real differentiator.

Email: Here's a practical one. Once they own their domain, they can have email at that domain. [email protected]. Professional, portable, theirs forever. No more changing email because Gmail or Yahoo changes their policies.

The Sovereignty Mindset

This is about more than websites. This is about teaching kids to think like owners, not renters. Builders, not just users. Sovereigns, not subjects.

We live in an age of platforms. Everything wants to intermediate your relationship with the world. Want to sell something? Go through Amazon. Want to be heard? Go through social media. Want to transact? Go through banks.

Sometimes platforms make sense. But the default should be ownership, with platforms as tools, not the other way around.

Teaching kids to own their domain is the first step. It's concrete, practical, and cheap. But it plants a seed: You can build things you control. You don't have to accept the defaults. The rules are more negotiable than they appear.

That mindset is worth more than the domain itself.

The Ask

Here's what I want you to do this weekend:

  1. Check if your kid's name is available as a .com domain.
  2. If it is, buy it. It's $12. Do it before someone else does.
  3. Sit down with your kid and build the first version together. Even if it's just one paragraph on a white page.
  4. Put a recurring reminder on your calendar, monthly website night.

In ten years, your kid will have a digital asset that tells their story, that they control, that compounds in value every year they add to it.

Or they'll have an abandoned social media account on a platform that doesn't exist anymore.

Your call.

, Marc