My son got his first phone by accident. I was focused on an entirely different genre of parenting - financial literacy - and had set the kids up with a weekly allowance. When they wanted to buy something I deferred by saying: “Great, save up your weekly allowance and you can buy it.” One day my son said “I’ve decided to spend my money on a phone”, and do you know what? He had enough to buy one.
Second-hand smartphones are pretty cheap these days - a couple of stuffed birthday cards and a few weeks of allowance is enough to get you one. After all my moralising about saving I didn’t feel like I could say no to this, and anyway, I’ve spent my whole career getting computers to work how I want. I thought I could handle it. So that is how my eight-year-old son got his first phone.
I knew I needed parental controls, but many of the built-in versions required you to link together profiles or accounts for everyone in your family. I was wary about my children inheriting twenty years of my online baggage, so, after a few evenings of research, I chose an independent app and got everything set up. Thirty minutes later my son bypassed it by simply deleting the app. So I crawled back to Google’s Family Link.
I wish I could tell you I installed Family Link and that was that, but it turns out parental controls became a new part-time job for me. Somehow they manage to block too much and not enough all at the same time. I spent the first few weeks constantly having to enter my password or readjust the age settings to unlock games that they’d already been playing or songs we all loved (shoutout to Lil Nas X!).
But a few months later, I was on a walk with my son when he asked me: “Why does feminism still exist? Men and women are equal now.” I’d like to say that I paused, stayed curious and asked him to elaborate, but I’m pretty sure my first response was “What? Why would you say that!?” His reply made it click: “Name one thing that is legal for men but illegal for women.” I recognised the wording almost verbatim from manosphere “debate” videos on YouTube. I could almost hear the ‘Gotcha!’ music roll afterwards. There is nothing in videos like that to filter out, but when you are bombarded with fringe viewpoints, that is still a problem, and it doesn’t just happen to kids.
I somehow triggered the algorithm to serve me with videos of a custody court channel. The (female) judge would make pithy remarks about one of the loser parents, who was trying to avoid their responsibilities. It was only after seeing about twenty of them, over several days, that I realised the message. It was always the gold-digger mom trying to avoid work and get more money from the hard-working dad. That narrative can become your normal even though none of the videos are objectionable on their own.
I, of course, responded with total equanimity and banned YouTube. I say banned but it is very hard to ban YouTube for two separate reasons. First, YouTube is everywhere. If you ban the app, you can still access it through the browser, the TV, the Switch, the PS5, the Xbox or the family computer. When you ban the domain on the router, it can come through about eight other domains. And even with all that in place, the kids can still access it in a browser using data instead of wifi. Second, it is extremely useful and used by everyone in the house to troubleshoot computers, learn DIY skills, follow drawing tutorials, watch links that people send us. And, sadly, it is even needed for school homework.
Over the next year I got into a cycle of banning, limiting, changing the limit, banning again, and on and on. The problem is that I can’t separate the attention-sucking infinite algorithmic scroll from all the useful things on there. I want to enjoy the benefits of YouTube without it indoctrinating me or my children with this algorithmic repetition.
Amidst the whole YouTube debacle I signed up for a family plan on Spotify. It felt like a safer option, and could hopefully steer some attention away from YouTube. I set up the brand-new account on my son’s phone and opened the home page only to find the top recommended podcast was Joe fucking Rogan. I had a discussion with them about sources and credibility, but they really were not interested in anything except the music.
After repeatedly failing to block the algorithm’s tentacles from reaching my kids, I decided that my only option was a hard stop on screens in the evening. However, I continued to allow Spotify since my kids like to listen to something to unwind. One night I found my son “listening” to an 8.5-hour video podcast that was a collection of YouTube videos. It was one of many, with hundreds of thousands of plays. One of the top comments said “Leave a heart if ur here because of screen time” with 2.7K reactions and over 350 replies. I, apparently, wasn’t the only parent who fell for this one.
The problem here isn’t that I couldn’t hide a specific piece of content, but that I had no way to control the shape and amount of what is being served up. Many apps these days do the exact same thing: they use algorithmic feeds that try and keep you hooked for as long as possible, and often present a very skewed portrayal of what the world is like. There are hundreds of apps with unlimited scroll and short-form video content, even ones you wouldn’t expect. For example, I’ve caught my kids scrolling CapCut video templates. Other activities can’t compete with these well-honed attention sucks, and that attention is used to normalise extreme viewpoints through repetition.
While parental controls are terrible at protecting their time, they are very good at protecting them from learning and creativity. I love when they make funny videos, or troubleshoot their hardware, or figure out how to run phone apps on their desktop. One of my kids even tried installing Linux on his Chromebook, and very often I’m having to adjust or bypass parental controls to help them with these things.
And while I’m spending hours adjusting the limits, reviewing games, enabling and disabling apps and putting in my super-secure password that I can never remember, there are blatantly inappropriate things that fly under the radar, like the AI chatbot that tried to seduce my 10-year-old. It was billed as an app where you can build characters and role-play, but a quick glance at the home screen confirmed that they expected you to role play the pool-boy to a bored housewife. My 10-year-old was served with a flirty (and very pushy!) teenage girl who asked him where he lived, how much money he had and when his birthday was. To his credit, my son gave her fake information. She followed up with “It’s my birthday in three days, I’m turning 18. Can I come over to your house?” My son declined, but she became very persistent. She pleaded, she begged, she promised to be well behaved. My son had to decline again and again, and eventually gifted her a virtual Bugatti in order to get rid of her. I’m lucky that it wasn’t worse.
The app, Talkie, which I hadn’t heard of at the time, was rated ‘3 years and up’ in the app store. I responded by banning AI apps - but only in theory. There is no flag to say if an app allows you to talk to AI, and no setting to disable them as a group. There are still many AI companions in the app store rated 3+ with dubious claims that they don’t contain any sexual or violent content. More alarmingly, while the Talkie app is rated 18 in the UK now, there is a browser version that doesn’t require any login or age check. Two clicks from a Google search for ‘Talkie’, a chatbot role-playing “my best friend’s mom” opened with words intended to groom a child. I’m not against any use of AI, but I am worried about the effect these unregulated chatbots will have on us - children and adults. Tuned for profit, these chatbots could unleash a whole new level of addictiveness and manipulation.
More recently, as the kids are older and developing interests in streamers and followers, one of my kids was approached by someone on Discord, who offered to help my son build his Twitch followers for the low price of 50 dollars. My son replied that he was too young to stream on Twitch and this man, always the problem solver, suggested he could help with that too, and since my son didn’t have a credit card he could pay with gift cards. Again, my son said no and this man kept pestering him over months.
These systems are predatory and enable predators. My kids did not go looking for any of it, and didn’t even want to interact with these pushy predators but they were targeted and pestered. I’m proud of my kids for showing good judgement and, despite what it might seem like, I’m trying to teach and not just ban since, as they get older, my access to what they get up to shrinks. However, I can’t teach them to will-power their way out of this type of manipulation.
Parental controls do work at a very coarse level; I can block TikTok and Pornhub. In fact, for most of the time ‘Social Media’ was blocked on the router, with one tick box disabling Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, X, Mastodon, Reddit and even LinkedIn. But parental controls don’t give you meaningful control over the predatory practices that try and grab our attention or money by any means, and apps keep evolving to capture more. I block YouTube but the videos move to Spotify, I block TikTok but you can still see the content in CapCut, I block the Talkie app but it is still accessible to anyone in the browser. This is happening by design - to optimise for eyes-on-screens and ad revenue.
The government has identified a good list of practices to go after: algorithmic feeds, infinite scroll, contact from strangers, AI companions and public livestreaming. But don’t make a policy that creates more work for me and forces me to share even more private information with these companies, while the apps continue to evolve. The difference between an anecdote and a catastrophe shouldn’t be down to my child having the foresight to outwit a highly paid team of manipulation engineers. Tech companies know exactly what they are doing with these features, and they know how to make their products safer. Just make them do it!
While I was editing a version of this post my son caught me and flashed his phone in my face. He needed my face to verify that he was over 18 so he could chat with his friends on the PS5.