Parental controls regarding children’s high-tech devices are not in contact with children’s play

Parenting in the digital age is stressful and requires a lot of demand from parents.

The Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI) recently released an annual online safety survey that found that almost 50% of the parents surveyed do not use parental controls to manage their children’s devices. These are, on the surface, tools that help parents eliminate inappropriate content or unnecessary interactions on their children’s devices.

The authors of FOSI concluded why parents are not using the tool. Because they feel “overwhelmed” and encourage parents to educate themselves as a good first step towards wider use.

While overwhelming is real, the bigger issues with parental control suggest how they are designed. This includes little attention paid to supporting open communication between parents and children.

Once a year in the last three years, we asked the same 33 children (originally 6-12 years old) who were thinking about content ratings, online safety, game monetization, and privacy. Our team combined with expertise in communication, education, policy and gaming research to analyze the answers.

They also asked parents how they mediated their children’s games. Almost half of them also use no parental controls. They say that parental controls don’t always work as promised, and provide little context about how settings affect gameplay and affect binary choices that do not align with family rules or child maturity levels.

The parents we asked said they were not eschewing parental control as they felt they were overwhelmed by them. The tool is poorly designed.

Parent controls can introduce more problems

At the same time, many parents explained that they themselves were very involved in their children’s gameplay. They talk regularly with children and encourage play in shared, supervised spaces. Some said they chose to trust their children rather than setting top-down restrictions.

Our findings are consistent with previous research on digital parenting. In one UK study, parents said that while some controls felt that they were valuable supplements for mediation, others were poorly designed and introduced more problems than solutions.

Using parental controls does not necessarily lead to increased child safety. In fact, using parental controls can lead to disconnection between the parent and child for major safety issues.

Risk recognition

The six children we interviewed did not know that their parents were using controls. At least two children revealed that they didn’t even know why parents used parental controls first. In this context, parental efforts to protect children had the unintended side effect of obscuring important knowledge, ensuring that children are unaware of some of the important risks associated with playing online. Parental control can remove opportunities to teach children about safety if not part of the conversation.

We believe that behind-the-scenes protections made possible by (some) parental control can be harmful to parent-child communications regarding online safety. What is the risk? How can children avoid the most dangerous behavior? What should they do when or when they are in danger?

On the other hand, parents are not always familiar with the features or activities that are restricted or requested to allow. Few parents’ controls contain information about how gameplay is affected by settings. Many contain terms that only those familiar with the game understand, but others find it difficult to navigate.

All this leads to misunderstandings and parent-child conflicts, making the tools more difficult to use.

The power of communication

Open communication between parents and children on safety topics cultivates trust.

This allows children to build resilience and reduce the risk of being harmed by negative online encounters.

Research also suggests that parent-child communication may help to avoid harm than embedded restrictions enabled by parental control.

The importance of open communication is also highlighted in the FOSI report. In households where online safety conversations occurred regularly (more than six times a year), both parents and children were more likely to view parental control as a useful and valuable tool for online safety.

This concludes that the authors “support the online safety view as a collaborative effort, in contrast to the priorities placed by parents on children.”

I could not agree any further on this point. Families will benefit from parental control and safe environments being a family event. There is a lot to learn from each other about the digital world, and reviewing these systems together can provide a much-needed opening for risk, safety and important conversations about what makes a child meaningful about digital play.

Rethinking safety tools

Parental control should not be pretended to be a panacea for child safety.

Many parental controls contain serious design flaws and limitations. Few people address the needs and concerns of either their children or their parents in a comprehensive manner.

Now that lawmakers are beginning to make parental control an essential part of the new Child Safety Act, we need to start looking closer and critically at what they can and cannot.

Parental controls can be useful tools when they are well designed, transparent and provide adequate options for families. Therefore, it can be tailored to grow not only to fit family rules and open communication.

Before this is the norm, there is a lot to do. It is also a driving force behind the increase in gaming and other tech companies to make it happen.

This article will be republished from the conversation under a Creative Commons license. Please read the original article.