Teens Can Hack Apple’s Parental Controls. Why Are Parents Surprised?

The Washington Post reported that teens have figured out how to get around Apple’s Screen Time.  Why parents are surprised, beats me.  Kids and teens today have a lot of experience navigating their digital worlds.  They know how to find solutions to problems by experimentation and/or by looking online.  I google recipes, why shouldn’t they do the same to achieve their goals? 

What Are We Hoping to Get Out of Parental Controls?

One important question is: What are we hoping to get out of ‘parental controls’.  Apple Screen Time, or any parental control on a device, artificially controls behavior.  It doesn’t teach self-regulation, it doesn’t promote critical thinking (unless you count hacking), it doesn’t explain why limiting screen time is a good idea and it certainly does nothing to inhibit the motivation to go online.  In fact, for many teens, it will increase desire. 

I have nothing against using these kinds of tools with the recognition that artificial controls only constrain a certain behavior with a certain app or device. They don’t teach good habits that are transferable to other situations or devices.  Parental controls should be viewed as training wheels until a kid gets his/her balance, not a solution.  To overuse the bicycle metaphor, getting balance requires education and practice.  If you’re using parental controls as a sense of security that you’re protecting your kids, you’re fooling yourself.

The only solution is education.  Call it media literacy, technology literacy or digital citizenship—what matters is that kids are taught about the benefits, challenges and dangers of living in a digital world.  They will only learn this if you help teach them.  Like Driver’s Training.  

Parental Participation or Parental Controls?

There is a myriad of important topics, big and small, that are fundamental to the goal of parental controls–healthy screen use.  These are just a few:

• The risks of using your screen while walking or driving
• How using a screen right before bed may keep you from falling asleep
• The importance of balance
• The cognitive burden of continual interruptions that impact performance (from grades to basketball)
• How to navigate social relationships that flow from online to offline and back again
• How to recognize and withstand bullies, trolls and other dangers
• How to identify misinformation (and our tendency to believe things that match what we already think)
• The illusion of digital privacy
• The permanence (and lack of control) over online information and images

All of these topics are part of good media literacy training and all need explanations as to WHY.  Just because kids quit nagging you for explanations, doesn’t mean they no longer want them.  It is the foundation for critical thinking.  But explaining requires a long enough conversation to understand what drives kids and to help them see how healthy digital behaviors fit into their goals—it means finding out what matters to them.   Controls—or even access—should be put that context.  

Smartphones Are Like Oxygen to Teens

Parents take note. Phones are the portal into a kid’s social life—which is to say, a phone represents everything he/she cares about.  There are lots of developmental reasons why this is so, but that’s not the point here. Don’t make judgments about the value teens place on being connected based on your needs or what it was like when you were a teenager.  It’s quite a different world. Try to acknowledge what a phone means to tweens and teens and respect their needs in how you establish boundaries and rules.  

This does not mean letting kids make the rules—it means letting them feel heard.  Kids have a much shorter time horizon on goals than adults–not many 14-year-olds worry about much beyond the next day at school or the weekend.   But they don’t know all the rules that apply offline much less online. That’s what parents are for. They already know how to hack their phone. They don’t need you for that–they need you for critical thinking, values and guidance. Teens may argue that they don’t need sleep or that having their phones on all night doesn’t ‘bother them.’  Maybe they think that their grades won’t suffer if they text throughout doing homework or that the world will stop if they miss a message.  Take the time to explain your reasoning and show how it relates to their goals.  You may need to help them think about their goals—both short and long. Or let them run an occasional experiment to “prove you wrong.”   

Connect Early and Often: Be Willing to be “Lame”

If you can connect with them early enough, it will establish a powerful pattern of communication.  It isn’t until they are teens that they think are totally out of touch (which you likely are) but even then, if you each explain you point of view, they may think you are lame, but at if you let them talk, they have to listen to you in return. With explanations, your rules may seem lame, but not arbitrary.

Kids will not always like your rules, (mine surely didn’t and often still don’t) but, surprisingly, they will respect that you gave them a ‘why’ and they will feel cared for.  If you don’t take the time to develop trust and lay the foundation for critical thinking, you will face teenage years full of hacking, burner phones and other means of subverting whatever controls you can think up.

Check out my friend Diana Graber’s book Raising Humans in a Digital World for a common sense approach to arming your kids for success in a socially-connected, 24/7 landscape.