I know I’m not alone as a parent when I admit I have often felt like an exasperated failure in trying to restrict what my children see online. There were the times they hacked their devices’ screen time settings, or managed to stumble into inappropriate content in spite of the controls, not to mention the ever inventive workarounds to access restricted sites. Worst of all is the ill will the rigmarole creates between us all. So when in the first minute of my conversation with digital parenting coach Elizabeth Milovidov, she says, “I think parents need to just kind of give themselves a hug, breathe and start over,” I feel so heard and comforted I could cry.
“Parents are incredibly busy. They’re overwhelmed,” says Milovidov. “And then this whole idea of trying to lock things down is not easy. I remember trying to learn how to programme a VCR, and it was just like: oh my God.” And yet she herself, a parent of teens, seems so chill. She admits having watched far too much TV in the 70s, and she has turned out OK; she has a PhD and is an international consultant on tech and parenting.
What emerges from speaking with Milovidov and other experts in this field is that what is often needed is not so much a nuts-and-bolts guide to the ever-updating technical side of parental controls as a pep talk on mindset, communication and what’s realistically possible.
“There’s no way of sugar-coating it,” says Luke Savage, senior project officer at NSPCC Child Safety Online. “There are so many different elements that it is complicated and laborious. From the wifi router in the home to the device in a child’s hand, the computer console they’re playing on and the apps or games themselves – each one has individual settings and controls.” And even when parents have waded through it all, says Savage, they can’t “put their feet up and think: my work here is done. There are limitations to parental controls. They’re not perfect – children can bypass them if they’re clever enough.” These tools are a mere step in a far more nuanced process which, he says, “comes down to conversation and communication”.
Start talking about the internet early
“It’s not about controlling our children, and it’s not about fear,” says Milovidov. “It is about empowering them to make smart decisions, and we do that when they are at a very young age. We are trying to teach them how to behave when we are not in the room, when we are not looking over their shoulder – that’s what digital guardianship is.”
“The second they start to use technology, have those conversations in an appropriate manner and using language that’s suitable,” says Savage. Milovidov agrees: “What I always tell parents is that it doesn’t matter so much about the parental controls, as long as you’re talking to them, because even if you lock down that smartphone, that iPad, that gaming console, they are going to hear about [inappropriate content]. You’ve got to give them some strategies beforehand about what to do if somebody tries to show them something that they know is not appropriate.”
There’s a sense, she says, that if your child does see something inappropriate, you’ve failed. “I would just tell parents to believe in themselves a bit more. It’s inevitable that they’re going to see something at some point.”
Router first
The most important place to start with safety restrictions, says Savage, “is the wifi router. That’s where you can block inappropriate websites and things like that.” There should be a step-by-step guide on your provider’s website. Although bear in mind that if a child’s phone has unlimited mobile data they can access at home, the router will be out of the equation.
Get to know the platforms
Generally, in tech, instruction manuals are a thing of the past; you just switch it on and the rest is intuitive bliss, supposedly. But with parental controls, taking a few minutes to read the guidance will make it a less seat-of-the-pants situation. (I recommend, with bitter hindsight, doing this before even introducing a new digital device or platform – any online space for socialising, gaming or streaming – into the family.) Milovidov says that there is usually good information on the websites for individual platforms, “including screenshots showing you step by step how to do some of the harder stuff”. The non-profit organisation Internet Matters has all sorts of guides to parental controls on its site. “They have great set-up tools for anything – TikTok, Roblox, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, all of the games.”
Check settings regularly
The NSPCC advises going back in at regular intervals. For a start, settings can be tampered with. “Let’s be honest – a child might think: ‘I can bypass parental controls.’” This is where that communication comes in: a child is more likely to respect the rules, “if they understand why you’re using certain settings, and there’s a suggestion that things will change as they get older, as happens in the real world.” But as with the real world, pushing boundaries is just what children do. “They can search for ‘how do I bypass my parental filter?’”
There’s also the issue that platforms often change and update their parental settings, says Savage, “so the parent might need to check on a semi-regular basis to make sure that the settings are still as they were”. Updates tend to be for the better, he adds, but sometimes this means there are new options that you need to decide whether or not to activate.
Finally, there’s the fact that children get older. “That setting from when they were five years old probably isn’t relevant when they’re 12.”
Rethink screen time
Screen time is less of a safety issue. “A child could be online for five minutes and experience harm,” says Savage. “We really push this conversation and thought process among parents of ‘screen time versus screen usage’.” As children move on to secondary school, much of their homework is online and managed through apps, as is communicating with friends. “So actually, when you’re talking about screen time, a lot of it might be things they have to be doing, rather than endlessly scrolling on a social media site, for example.”
Milovidov suggests considering five criteria if you’re worried about screen time. Are they eating well? Are they sleeping well? Are they doing well in school? Are they doing well with you – treating you, the parents and caregivers, well? And how are they interacting with friends? “If the answer to all of those things is, ‘Yeah, they’re doing pretty good,’ you really don’t have a screen issue.” You might be angry because they’re not coming when you call them to dinner and they want to play Fortnite or Roblox a little bit longer, but, she says: “I always tell parents: that’s normal. That’s like me watching Bridgerton: don’t bother me right now. Not all screen time is bad. I’ve been doing this for 15 years, telling people to look at the content of what they’re doing. If my 17-year-old is sitting there studying Spanish online, I am not going to lose my mind. But if he’s playing Call of Duty for hours on end, I’m going to be like: ‘Dude, what are you doing?’”
Be a good role model
If your child sees you on your phone constantly, they might think it’s one rule for them and another one for you, Savage points out. “If you can start to use wellbeing and screen-time-limiting tools yourself, and your child sees that, then it’s going to have an impact.” So if you can set up family rules, as opposed to child rules, then you should start to see “that the child thinks: ‘OK, this isn’t just an attack on me and my online world. This is for the good of all of us as a family.’”
Ekaterina Hertog, associate professor of AI and society at the University of Oxford, has found in her research interviews with young people that “monitoring is often very top-down. And sometimes that approach can be harmful, because it can be perceived by young people as: ‘My parents don’t trust me – I haven’t been doing anything wrong, and I explain it to them, but they don’t listen.’” This, she says, can create additional risks, “where young people try to go around those restrictions. When they get into trouble, they might be really reluctant to go to parents and tell them, ‘I went on that website and saw this really disturbing video,’ because they were not allowed.’”
“We’re creating a lot of fear,” says Milovidov. “Yes, there are risks online, but we cannot live in fear. Social media, games, messaging apps, AI, connected homes – they all come with their own set of risks. Whether it’s privacy, cyberbullying, misinformation, whatever, there are ways to limit the risk. But bans don’t always work.”
She can’t stress enough how engaging and talking is the number one priority. “You’ve got to have a relationship with them where they’re going to open up to you and let you know what happened at school. Sometimes I’m telling my boys how to be an upstander, not just a bystander.” This means that when they see bullying, or someone sends them something offensive online, they know how to intervene, “but not become a target themselves. Usually, humour is one of the best tools that a kid can have to get out.”
When they break the rules
Young people are always going to get around parental controls, says Milovidov. “It still happens in my house. They are going to test you.” It might feel like the last straw; time to remove any internet fun once and for all. Her advice is to think of it as if they were breaking real-life rules. “Whether it’s alcohol or inviting somebody over that shouldn’t be over, we don’t just lose it and ban everything for ever and ever. We ground them or there are other consequences.”
It pays to ask them why they need to get around these rules. How can we adjust? Is it that you need a little bit more time to play? Is it that you feel like you’re missing out with your friends? “Ask them to help you figure out a solution. You don’t want them to keep breaking your rules, because they’re breaking your trust. It’s about helping them understand why those limits are there. And it’s not just ‘because we said so’; you’re trying to teach them to be digitally responsible and not just digitally restricted.”
When her son was younger, he wanted to be able to chat with friends while he was gaming, Milovidov says. At first, “I was like, no, no, no, no, no. And we went through each of the features together, and he’s like, ‘OK, no, I don’t need that, and I don’t need this filter.’ And he himself kind of self-censored. It was literally ticking a box of chatting with only his friends, not with everyone in the world. And I was like: ‘Oh my gosh, well, of course you can do that.’”
It’s not that parents always have to acquiesce to young people’s point of view, says Hertog, but “just even having a conversation about it, feeling heard and understood … This communication could help parents to build up their young people to make good choices when they’re adults.” It’s similar to how we try to instil healthy eating. “Many children crave junk, so parents have conversations and hopefully manage some kind of compromise diet that’s more healthy than not. But the parental control technology encourages, or makes it easier, for parents to just be cops.”
Arrange alternative activities
One of the best ways to create a healthy balance is to give children chances to experience how good it feels to be active and social in the real world. Take them on outings, offer them alternative activities. “When my boys were younger,” says Milovidov, “it was setting up play dates. Otherwise they will all want to be on devices, because it’s exciting, it’s cool stuff.”
Don’t rush to judge their content
“It feels so difficult in the beginning – I won’t say unsavoury – to let all this tech into your life,” says Milovidov. She often hears parents despair that their children want to watch YouTubers playing video games. “They get so upset and they say, my child is not even playing the damn game. He’s sitting there watching somebody else on YouTube.” She laughs and tells them: “‘You do the same thing when you’re watching the Super Bowl or Wimbledon – you are watching somebody else play.’ And they’re like: ‘Oh, wow. I didn’t think of it that way.’ If you’re watching a cooking show, you’re not cooking. You’re getting tips. You’re learning how to do something different. And that’s what they do. They are learning.”
