A recent report by the Tech Transparency Project found that, despite parental controls offered by Apple and Google, teens can still access “nudify” apps to make AI-generated pornographic material. Many parents will respond by tightening restrictions on their teens’ digital media use. But that reflex, however understandable, may be creating a bigger problem.
In the absence of robust controls from tech companies, much of the current online safety advice urging parents to increase controls, restrict screen time, and closely oversee their teen’s activity reinforces an “Us versus Them” dynamic that can do more harm than good. While parental controls—digital tools that let parents monitor or limit what their children see, whom they communicate with, and how much time they spend online—can help reduce exposure to some online risks, they can also create conflict when teens see controls as overly restrictive or as undermining their autonomy and trust.
This creates a dilemma for parents: they want to protect their teens while also preserving their trust and independence. But monitoring can erode the very trust parents need to keep teens safe. Teens who fear being monitored may be less willing to share when they experience cyberbullying or sexual exploitation, see something they don’t understand, or become concerned about a friend.
A 2025 Family Online Safety Institute survey of parents and children ages 10-17 found that nearly three in four households set app restrictions on their children’s devices; more than 80% of parents in these households found the controls effective. But effectiveness at restricting access is not the same as keeping teens safe. Research offers little support for treating parental controls as a substitute for communication, trust, and other protections when it comes to online safety: A 2024 review in the Journal of Children and Media examined 30 studies on parental controls and found that 12 reported no change in online safety outcomes, while eight identified adverse effects such as family conflict, distrust, and reduced privacy or autonomy.
What protects teens is not simply strict monitoring; it’s having relationships they can turn to. Parents often know about teenagers’ lives because teens choose to tell them,not simply because adults keep closer tabs on them. When teens have someone to open up to, it can really matter: In a CDC survey, teens who said they always or usually received the social and emotional support they needed were far less likely to report depression symptoms than those who received support less often (8%, compared with 31%). Yet, in the same survey, while 77% of parents reported that their teen always received the support they needed, only 28% of teens said the same about their own experience.
In my 25 years designing and researching children’s media, I have seen that parents and teens generally want the same thing — safety, connection, belonging, and the ability to thrive in a digital world. The challenge is figuring out how to get there together. Parents cannot supervise every interaction, and online experiences change quickly. Developing an approach to online safety collaboratively helps teens (and parents!) develop judgment, not just compliance. Explaining the reasoning behind a rule, listening to each other’s perspective, and working through scenarios together can help teens practice making decisions they will eventually need to make on their own. Teens also often know more about the platforms, social norms, features, and workarounds they encounter every day than parents ever will. A two-way conversation lets parents contribute experience and perspective while learning from their teens’ firsthand knowledge.
The American Academy of Pediatrics’ customizable Family Media Plan offers a practical way to discuss media use and develop approaches that fit a family’s needs. It invites families to choose priorities together, explain the reasoning behind rules, and revisit them as needs change and children grow. Hopelab’s Lessons From the Field: Young People Share Four Tips for Parents on Online Safety and Well-being, released this week, likewise centers young people’s perspectives on navigating digital life. Both offer useful alternatives to treating digital well-being as a matter of parents monitoring or restricting teens’ behavior, framing it instead as an ongoing conversation that families can shape together.
Here’s what that might look like: A family wants to create guidelines to limit behavior they see as harmful to their teen, such as staying up each night until 1 am messaging with friends. Instead of setting a hard screen time limit, they talk about what matters to everyone: the teen wants to stay connected to friends, while the parents are worried about sleep. Together they agree that messaging with friends can run later on non-school nights, but that during the week messaging stops at 10 pm. Both parents and their teen agree to phone-free bedrooms at night (it is important that parents set the example they wish to see in their teen). They agree to try out the plan for two weeks and revisit it together. The conversation should also include the positive aspects of online engagement, such as helping teens find communities where they feel a sense of belonging, explore their identities and interests, develop creative skills, build friendships, and contribute to causes they care about.
Parents and their teens are not on opposing sides in a fight over technology. They are people trying to navigate the same rapidly changing world, often with very different information, experiences, and degrees of power. Doing so as partners rather than adversaries means shifting the conversation away from what parents need to take away from their teens to what young people can gain, and lose, from being online, and how parents can help them thrive.