Parental Controls Are Not Enough: Parents Must Unite to Protect Kids from Online Harms
About the author: Keena McAvoy, MPT is the Co-Founder of DMV Unplugged, an ambassador for the Phone Free Schools Movement, and a Digital Wellness Educator.
Last week, the horrific murder of Charlie Kirk at a Utah Valley University event was recorded by untold numbers of attendees, who then shared the graphic footage on social media. Algorithms quickly pushed these unedited videos to the top of the feed, where countless kids and teens saw them and shared them further. It is impossible to “unsee” these kinds of images.
One mother told The Washington Post that she “assumed that the parental controls on her 14-year-old daughter’s social media accounts would prevent the teen from seeing it.” She was mistaken; her daughter saw the clip when a friend texted it to her. The unacceptable truth is that parental controls will not protect your child in the way that you hope and assume. If your child has a phone that is connected to the internet or goes to school or socializes with friends who do, they will be exposed to images and content that you do not want them to see.
“If your child has a phone that is connected to the internet or goes to school or socializes with friends who do, they will be exposed to images and content that you do not want them to see.”
Kids are very smart. Their developing brains are naturally motivated to seek novel and extreme content. Your child knows how to get around parental controls or they have a friend who does. Additionally, the parental control features themselves are often ineffective at “controlling” the toxic and viral landscape of social media. That’s because social media companies, using persuasive design principles, optimize their products for engagement rather than safety. Expecting parental controls to protect children from harmful content on social media is like putting up a one-foot guardrail before an 18-wheeler careens off the road.
Here’s another unacceptable truth: this terrible video was probably not the only grossly inappropriate content your child saw online last week. Violent and sexually explicit content is rampant on social media, including on platforms marketed as safe for teens, like Instagram Teen Accounts. As parents, we must have conversations with our kids and teens about these difficult topics, with the understanding that their perception and comprehension is skewed by a still-developing prefrontal cortex. They are children. They may feel that it is “no big deal” that they witnessed Charlie Kirk’s killing or other violent content. But when a child views this type of content, it changes them. We must do more to spare our children’s developing brains from the steady stream of inappropriate, extreme, violent, and addictive content that social media algorithms push on them in the name of engagement.
“We live in an incredibly difficult time to be a parent, but we must not throw up our hands because the ‘train has left the station.’ We need to stop the train.”
How can we do this? By reclaiming our power as parents. “You are in charge” is the number one rule in psychologist Jean Twenge’s new book, 10 Rules for Raising Kids in a High-Tech World. The YOU that is in charge is all of us. We live in an incredibly difficult time to be a parent, but we must not throw up our hands because the “train has left the station.” We need to stop the train by delaying our children’s access to smartphones and social media for as long as possible, and by developing technology rules for the home that prioritize the wellbeing of the entire family. As the movement to delay or reverse our children’s access to exploitative technology grows, childhood as a whole will be healthier and safer. We must act now to protect our children from an industry that hasn’t acknowledged or been held accountable for the harms and immense challenges that they have thrown in our laps.
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