When Parental Controls Fail: Teaching Your Kids Digital Literacy

Right now, social media giants Meta (parent company of Facebook and Instagram) and Google (parent company of YouTube) are both in a court battle debating whether their products are addictive. (TikTok and Snapchat were also named in the lawsuit but settled out of court.)

Plaintiffs argue that these companies purposely created addictive products and marketed them to underage users, leading to a surge in teen mental health problems: anxiety, depression, body dysmorphia, eating disorders, self-harm, suicidal ideation and more. The defendants argue that their products are not addictive. Rather, people put so much value in social media that they willingly and knowingly develop doomscrolling and other compulsive social media habits.

The truth may be more nuanced than we’d like to admit.

On the one hand, I quit all forms of social media several years back. At the time, I could recognize that my bad habits were within my ability to control, but I simply wasn’t controlling them (hence the decision to quit). But I was an adult, not a teenager. And I’m not someone who typically struggles with impulse control, emotional regulation or other behavioral traits that can increase risk of addiction. Additionally, I remember how difficult it was to quit Instagram specifically—not necessarily because my behaviors were so out of control but because Meta seemed to intentionally make it difficult for users to permanently delete their accounts.

My personal experience notwithstanding, social media addiction is a huge pain point for parents. And you’ve probably heard the advice from experts—you may have even read some of it here at Plugged In—advice such as no phones in bedrooms or no screentime an hour before bed.

Unfortunately, that’s not always enough.

Parental Controls Have Little Effect

Meta claims that parental controls and direct parental supervision are enough to keep kids safe from the downsides of social media. However, according to TechCrunch, Meta also conducted an internal study in partnership with the University of Chicago called Project MYST (Meta and Youth Social Emotional Trends). The survey, which has been submitted as evidence against Meta in the ongoing trial, revealed that these measures are not enough.

Project MYST concluded that “parental and household factors have little association with teens’ reported levels of attentiveness to their social media use.” In other words, what we’ve been saying at Plugged In all these years is correct: Setting up parental controls and establishing rules for screentime use can be very effective with younger children—who technically aren’t allowed to create their own social media accounts anyway. However, as children get older, those rules and controls become less and less successful at preventing screentime overuse.

Rather, you have to talk to your kids about screen time. More than that, you have to teach them digital literacy.

What Is Digital Literacy—and Why Is It Important?

When your kids are young, parental controls and screentime rules work because your kids don’t know how to circumvent them yet. If the timer on YouTube Kids goes off, as long as they don’t know your passcode, they won’t be able to keep watching. As you put your toddler to bed at night, you can take away the tablet to make sure they aren’t caught in a blue-light stare into the wee hours of the morning.

But as your kids get older—and I’m talking the tween years, like 8 years old (or younger if your kid is particularly tech savvy)—they can watch video tutorials to figure out how to get around your filters and time limits. They may simply grab someone else’s tablet (as I watched my own nephew do while babysitting). Or they might even purchase a phone on their own, without your knowledge or permission.

For those reasons and more, it’s important to teach your kids digital literacy—which is defined by UNICEF as the “knowledge, skills and attitudes that allow [people] to be both safe and empowered in an increasingly digital world.”

In order to teach your child digital literacy, you can’t use the old standby “because I said so.” Instead, it’s far more valuable to explain why your family’s rules exist. And as your kids grow up, you might even invite them into the conversation, asking them what screentime boundaries need to be established—and how they might be fairly and effectively enforced.

How to Teach Digital Literacy

Think of digital literacy like a subject in school. For instance, in kindergarten, teachers focus on teaching students the alphabet first. Then come small words. Then simple sentences. As each year goes by, teachers increase the level of difficulty with harder vocabulary terms and more complex grammar rules.

It’s the same with digital literacy.

Start by creating those device-free zones and times. When your kiddos ask why those rules exist, tell them in simple terms: “because it’s time to sleep,” “because it’s time to eat,” “because mommy and daddy want to spend time with you.” As they get older, increase the level of difficulty with harder concepts and more complex screentime facets. For instance, “We don’t take our phones into our bedrooms because the blue light emitted by our screens—not to mention notifications—disrupt our natural sleep patterns.”

Next, set up screentime limits. If your child needs to use their screen for homework, that’s OK. But outside of schoolwork, you should limit time for playing games or browsing social media. For younger kids, you can apply the same rules and conversations for screentime limits that you do for other forms of play. With tweens and teens, talk to them about how gaming and social media platforms are designed: “Social media algorithms are designed to engage us, which can make it difficult to stop scrolling,” you might say. Or perhaps, “When you level up in a video game, you get a burst of dopamine, which increases the likelihood that you’ll continue playing.”

Privacy and safety is another serious concern. “Stranger danger” is a real thing. If you’ve got a young gamer in the house, they should only be playing online games with people they know (and you know) in real life. And when it comes to social media, a good rule of thumb is that if your child is below the age limit for an account, they shouldn’t have one. Even if they seem mature enough to handle social media, the privacy and safety functions for underage users just aren’t there. So just like your kid will have to wait to learn to drive a car, they’ll have to wait to get a social media account, too.

Once your child is old enough to play games—or especially if they’re old enough to post to social media—you’ll also need to start having conversations about self-worth. If your child loses a game, that doesn’t make them a “loser.” Rather, you could frame failure as an opportunity to improve and learn new skills. Similarly, if your teen posts a video to social media that doesn’t perform as well as they’d hoped, that doesn’t mean their inherent value has diminished. Instead, try to ground them in real-world relationships, reinforcing that what people think of them in real life matters far more than digital approval.

For that matter, it’s good to talk about how interactions with people on social media and in video games make your kids feel. If your kid is getting bullied by other players in a game, teach him to disengage, log off and seek another form of entertainment. However, it’s also important to acknowledge and validate his feelings: Help him to report any abuse and block players who don’t play nice. Similarly, if your teenager is getting cyberbullied on social media, don’t just tell her to ignore it. Abuse should be reported. Abusers should be blocked. And again, in both cases, remind your child that their inherent value isn’t diminished by what people say about them online. The anonymity of the internet gives many people a boldness that they’d never have face-to-face.

And that actually leads into the last part of digital literacy. Repeat after me: “What people post on social media is rarely a true reflection of what their lives are really like.”

Kids should learn about content discernment early on. Influencers get paid to promote products. They look and act a certain way on social media in order to sell a brand (even when that “brand” is themselves). They employ filters, makeup, editing tactics and more to give the appearance of glamour or ease. But in reality, their lives can be a constant grind. And many get burnt out.

Fight the Good Fight

The truth is, we’re scared. We’ve read the horror stories online. We’ve seen kids zombified by their screens. And even when we set up parental controls—things like screentime limits, filters and parent-supervised accounts—even when we establish rules, such as no phones in bedrooms or no screentime before bed, we can still feel helpless.

Hopefully everything I listed above will help set some ground work for teaching your kids digital literacy. But remember, this isn’t a one-time conversation: It’s an ongoing process that will continue even after your kids grow up and move out.

Make sure that you practice what you preach. Your teens will be more open to obeying your family’s digital rules if they know that you self-impose those rules, too. After all, it’s not about policing their screen time so much as it is about guiding it, ensuring that they build healthy habits that will keep them grounded throughout their lives.

At Plugged In, we’ll try to help you on this journey. We want to come alongside you and fight the good fight, helping your kids with digital literacy and helping you with managing their screen time. You can find more details about these topics and more in our free Parents’ Guide to Technology. And if your family needs a digital reset, join us in our screentime fast in just a few weeks.