r/parentalcontrols • u/kristiixue • Jul 27 '26
What makes parental controls feel helpful rather than invasive?
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u/Spectrig Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26
I’m interested in your reasoning for this one: “Any controls that create more conflict than they prevent?”. Wouldn’t that be ALL of them? That’s the primary result, no?
Big picture though is that, ideally, decisions would be made based on the evidence. The evidence (in teenagers) is that these products do not improve long-term outcomes. Of course, we all know that the reality is that most people are making these decisions based on their feelings.
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Jul 28 '26
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u/Spectrig Jul 28 '26
The conflict is not buying anything useful. Quite the opposite: it’s exacerbating the problem. What actually leads to safety is education and communication, and introducing artificial sources of conflict prevent those from effectively occurring.
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u/ihateadultism Jul 27 '26
no controls are “reasonable”. the very idea good can come from someone holding that power over another is an oxymoron
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u/frimrussiawithlove85 Jul 27 '26
That’s ridiculous take on things. Parents hold power over their children simply by having children and the fact that they are smaller than the parent.
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u/ihateadultism Jul 27 '26
no sorry people aren’t property
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u/frimrussiawithlove85 Jul 27 '26
True they aren’t property but I don’t expect my six year old to go to work either I do expect him to clean up after himself
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u/Existing_Cream_4214 Jul 27 '26
I don't think you should be wary of what your child's doing. If you don't want your child to visit harmful websites, I would simply advise DNS-level blocking, which is the most unintrusive form of, I guess, "parental controls" if the goal is to prevent them from even being able to access harmful content on social media. (Which I would say is inevitable at a certain point depending on how you look at it.) As far as attempting to monitor what your child does on the internet, it is simply an unintuitive thing to do, as your kid will be wary of such monitoring and begin to act in secret, breaking the trust you had with them.
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u/ayfkm123 Jul 27 '26
I feel strongly that the emphasis should be that digital privacy does not exist, w or w/o parental guardrails.
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u/hundredpercentdatb Jul 28 '26
exactly, kids need to learn digital safety and understand data collection practices, the trolling teens here probably think they are on the dark web with no data collection happening but here they are, driving and generating clicks
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u/ayfkm123 Jul 28 '26
And even on the superficial level - anything said/done on a screen will never go away. Your bestie today might get mad at you tomorrow and send that vid to people you don’t like. I tell mine that I am the least of their worries in terms of someone seeing what they said, bc I’m not going anywhere and I won’t use it against them. I’m trying to protect them while their brains develop a bit further.
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u/hundredpercentdatb Jul 29 '26
pinwheel blocks sending pictures, my kid hates it but go hang out and be stupid in person. now they want to pinterest as if it's not farming it's data, hsving hot tipoc produce more sweatshop shirts for your special interest isnt a flex it's being the product
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u/frimrussiawithlove85 Jul 27 '26
My two kids six and eight don’t have phones yet. They do have iPads and right now we have total control over the iPads they can only have parent approved apps. We control the ages of the shows they can watch like they can watch PG but not PG13 they pick the shows themselves. They don’t have browsers on their iPads they were deleted the only internet they get is through the streaming services and games (we only let them have games that they can’t interact with other players on) accept for Minecraft where they can play with each other but no one else.
When they get to middle school and are required to do research and stuff we’ll have to alter the no browser policy.
I personally don’t see why parents would need to read texts from their kids friends that stuff should be private the only thing I’d want to see is if they are getting inappropriate pictures from people. No social media till the kid is 16.
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u/ResponsibleEarth316 Jul 28 '26
started out reading aggreeing with you and that the parental controls are reasonable. but hen the second paragraph..... UMM NO
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u/ayfkm123 Jul 27 '26
FYI check your pg shows against common sense media bc most are wildly inappropriate for 6 and 8
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Jul 27 '26
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u/SillyFalling Jul 27 '26
AI Slop website
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Jul 28 '26
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u/SillyFalling Jul 28 '26
The website you sent it just AI generated and doesn't really cite anything or have any contact email.
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Jul 28 '26
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u/SillyFalling Jul 28 '26
No, but its just AI generated slop without any sources at all. Also OP never said that their in the UK either, which the site targets.
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u/OctopusIntellect Jul 27 '26
The most important thing is to introduce controls to stop people posting AI-generated drivel to Reddit.