Three Tips for Parents to Help your Child with Screen Management and Online Safety

04 Sep, 2025

This blog is not normally an advice column, but today I would like to recommend some parenting strategies for ways to manage screens, online privacy and security for your children.

Looking back on the different approaches we've tried in our home, here are at least three that worked:

Keeping screens out of bedrooms at night
Using conversation rather than parental control tools
Learning how to manage passwords sensibly

#1: Keeping screens out of the bedroom (at night)

This works best if you are able to establish the rules from a young age. In our household, our children may take their screens to their rooms, but they must ask. It's a routine everyone has gotten used to. Sometimes, they'll want to call a friend without everyone listening in, or film something for a school project or just for fun, and in such cases, it's fine for them to take screens to the bedroom for that period.

Try to avoid the opposite scenario, where screens in the bedroom are the norm, and parents have to fight or negotiate for every minute to get them out.

As a high school teacher, I regularly saw tired faces. While some of that may have been my fault (I hope not!), when I asked students what was going on, they would often confess they went to bed too late. As in 3 or 4 AM late on a school night. They were honest about this, sometimes making a joke of their situation. The un-managed smartphone was often the culprit. I thought it strange that I should know more about my students' problematic sleep patterns than their parents might, especially when the solution seems obvious: take away the smartphone for bedtimes.

However, ff your teenagers are already used to taking their devices to their bedrooms at night, you may have a battle ahead, and you'll have to decide whether or not it is worth it. For a 17-year-old, who will technically be an adult in a year, it may be too late to attempt to reverse established patterns, but for a 13-year-old, who still has several years of social media intrigue ahead, it might be worth adjusting the rules over a period of time towards healthier daily habits.

On the other end of the child age range, it is always tempting to hand the rambunctious toddler a tablet. They seem universally mesmerised, instantly silent. This can feel like a magical solution, for example, if you have something you need to get done yourself, but be careful not to make handing out screens a go-to habit at that age, as you are inadvertently establishing norms for for the future as well, and these are much harder to undo.

I added 'at night' in my subtitle above, as keeping screens out when children need to sleep is the absolute bottom line. What might help establish this is setting up a charging shelf in the front room, and perhaps even leading by example, although I don't think parents always need to follow the rules they set for their children.

Lastly, there is the issue of homework, so much of which now happens online. Your home may not have a suitable space where your child can concentrate, due to noise or just living and being a family together, and so your best solution may be to have your kids do their work in their bedrooms. Here, clear rules about bedtimes (until the age of about 17, I would say) and removal of screens from bedrooms at night can still work.

#2: Conversations instead of controls

My oldest bore the brunt of all our parental worries about children and the Internet. So we set up parental controls on all the devices. I would now say: forget about using parental control tools, with the exception for very young kids.

First, there are issues with the tools and platforms themselves. You may need to do a little investigating to make sure your and your children's behavioural data are not being sold by the company that makes the software, and that they take security seriously. I recall discovering that some of my students' parents used a person locator called Life360 to track their kids—a parental control of sorts—only to discover that all that information was later shared through a hack.

A second issue is that parental controls put you in a policing role. They are a type of local surveillance mechanism, giving you more power through technology than is perhaps healthy in a family environment.

Third, they are finicky and time-consuming for parents themselves. I don't know how many times I was called to fill in a parental password in order for one of my kids to be able to play a game we had already bought, or download something. Perhaps they have become more refined since then, but in my experience, parental control software was a blunt tool that would regularly block perfectly legitimate content.

You could make an exception with parental controls for very young kids: toddlers and kindergarteners. Tools that limit time on device can be an effective method for teaching kids that tablets, computers or phones need to be turned off at some point, without putting you in the position of being the bad guy.

I've mentioned in previous articles that a retrospective talk with our eldest about our use of parental controls was insightful. It led to us exchanging controls for conversation with the younger siblings. Thanks for paving the way for the others, oldest one!

Conversations about screens, online safety, social media and security needn't be heavy. One major advantage that comes with keeping screens in the living room is that it opens the door to questions in a natural way. Questions like "What's that you're laughing at?", or "Who are you chatting with?" can show interest rather than intrusion, depending on tone. It's good to have some awareness of the day-to-day engagement your child has on the Internet, so you can jump in when there are concerns.

Having said that, I have had a few more serious sit-down moments to talk about vulnerability of young people online, and the statistics regarding predator and victim behaviour. Such conversations can start superficially in elementary school, and become more direct perhaps around the age of twelve. It helps to keep those conversations short and not graphic, but honest and realistic. You want to try to break any taboos around talking about these issues.

A different, but also workable alternative to parental controls is setting up shared admin accounts. This can be for the devices themselves, but also for social media platforms. The benefit can be that it will feel normal to have conversations and perhaps get permission before setting up a new account.

I record some of the passwords my kids use, and they know this. I almost never check up on them, but they know I am able to, and I am not secretive about it. I have with some dismay used a child's email inbox to set up a new account, only to discoverer all mails I sent shown in bold as 'unread'.

Keep in mind that soon they will be on their own as young adults, and will need to have some skills and experience navigating the internet and social media independent of you.

#3: Password management

Good password management is perhaps more directly related to online security, but it can have a knock on effect on online safety, social well-being and developing healthy digital habits.

I witnessed a lot of bad password management as a high school teacher, and would devote time during my lessons to address this. To begin with, many, if not most kids of any age seem to be the administrators of their own devices, essentially blocking their parents out. With young children, this is unacceptable, but even with older kids, there is a case for shared, then independent administration as they develop into adults.

If you are the shared administrator of your children's devices and accounts, then you can initially run a backup password management system for them. Should they forget a password, you can help them out, and they will appreciate it. From the vantage point of running a redundant password database, you'll also see potential risky patterns in how your child creates passwords, which you can address.

It is worth sitting down with each child individually to explain why using a unique password for every account is important (you may find you have to do some research on your own first). There are several ways to manage this many passwords. You can write them all down in a notebook, but, as I discovered with my youngest this week when trying to log her back into Ente, a private photograph platform, unclear handwriting can throw a real spanner in the works. This is especially true with privacy-first software like Ente, which encrypts everything and has no fall-back for lost keys! You could keep the accumulation of passwords in a digital document, but that may not be so secure and prone to accidental deletion or file corruption.

With all that in mind, I recommend using a password manager. You and your child will only need to memorise one 'master password' in order to access all the unique account passwords. Password managers also do a good job of creating unique, complex passwords for you, which can even be auto-filled when browsing. Just like with other tools, you have to do some research to see how money is being made, or what the history of the company is in terms of hacks and other security failures. If you don't have time for all of that, I recommend Bitwarden. It has a good reputation as a privacy-first, transparent password manager, and it is easy to use.

If even a fellow student (let alone a hacker) gains access to your child's chat or social media account, this can have devastating social consequences for them, for example, when private photographs or screenshots of natural gossip are shared with the others. I've seen real cases of this as a teacher and there is nothing you can do to stop these files from spreading.

Learning how to form and manage secure passwords is therefore a crucial skill for both young and old.

Conclusions

Of course with something like Bitwarden, you'll have to learn to use it yourself before you can teach your children. One of my next posts will be about this: the importance for parents to test out privacy and security options themselves first, keeping realistic limitations like time, energy and desire to learn in mind.

There are other good practices I'd like to delve into more, such as changing your child's browser search engine, or introducing your kids to open source software alternatives, but for now, these are my top three tips.

Keeping devices out of the bedroom at night and having normal, regular conversations with your kids about privacy, security and online safety are some of the only ways we can really protect them from potential harm and prepare them for a healthy relationship with technology as young adults. Learning how to manage passwords is a skill that they will need for life, at least until a more secure system for logging on comes along.