Parental controls are such a scam

I discovered a few months ago that I could make shows disappear. Word Party was the first to leave, followed by Boss Baby. My kid was made to talk like a baby by the former. The latter's crime was that everyone was mean to each other. I told my child that those shows weren't appropriate for her and it was too hard for her to skip watching them if they were available, so I put them on hiatus. They wouldn't show up in the search or on the home screen because of the by-title blocking feature. She accepted the rationale and found something else to watch.

The game of whack-a-mole moved to the two-year-old. His current prize is the home screen of Netflix, which was a virtual bottomless cave of annoying delights. I could ban that, but they would suggest something else. I wondered if I could reverse the process and opt in to a selection of shows on a profile instead.

I couldn't. This feature isn't available on a lot of companies. Depending on the service, I could limit the content to ratings buckets or age. I couldn't set restrictions by profile, but only by device, as the assumption was that each family member would have their own.

Legally-mandated sop streaming services and entertainment providers throw parental control features to parents. They are a way for companies to not have to worry about how their products are being marketed to children.

Digital services want to be engaging, and providing useful limiting functions would likely be bad for business. The only advice that is ever given is to create and enforce screen time limits. Digital entertainment is treated as a monolith instead of engaging in valid criticism about how different products are designed.

There is a growing advocacy movement pushing back against the idea that families are the only ones responsible for media usage and quality.

It is worth establishing the farce of parental controls features. Companies probably wouldn't create them if they really cut down on device use, says an education reporter for NPR and author of The Art of Screen Time.

The illusion of control that they create allows parents to relax a little bit.

These dubiously effective features are not simply out of altruism. Many caregivers don't realize that the menu of parental control options they're presented with in an app, game, or streaming service are required by laws like America's Children. Livingstone said parents should get a package called "This is how to help your child" and "This is us being a morally and ethically responsible provider." These features often fulfill legal requirements.

Livingstone looked for information on parental consent in order to help families have more agency over digital entertainment. She found a lot of research on parental control, a related approach that focuses on limits. I wanted to create a walled garden on the internet that showed only the shows my kids were allowed to watch. I wouldn't care how many hours of Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood or Molly of Denali were consumed, because I wouldn't have cared.

Livingstone says that parental control features are just a burden and that they are not empowering parents. People with more time, money, and tech savvy will be the ones reading reviews on Common Sense Media and how-to guides for setting up limits on different devices. Higher-income parents will be the ones who can pay for other entertainment options with higher-quality design and more moderation baked in.

A design critic and parent says intensive monitoring is just a lot of work. The Design of Childhood is a book about how the material world shapes kids. Beyond buying software, or reading reviews, caregivers may spend time monitoring their children's devices, messages, and social media use.

Kate McKean is a parent and she likes to have the option to remove the app. I told my kids that I had deleted the shared iPad from YouTube Kids, and that it was a lie.

The difficulty with regulation is not limited to streaming services. Video games have been designed to take resources from your kids.

Kids know that they are being exploited.

A report on the values of children in a digital environment was published in November of 2021. The document calls on industry and regulatory figures to change the way products and services are designed and operated.

The report paints a damning picture of the relationships kids have with their digital services. The case studies of popular digital products are presented by the authors. Each of the eight services gets low marks in the voluntary category, a measure of how kids feel about the product.

Children who were interviewed reported enjoying digital play but not liking how hard it is to stop. The report's authors acknowledge that this is a difficult tension. Games that are enjoyable to play are hard to put down. We should listen to what young players and audiences are saying, that it's not fun to feel tricked into playing and watching more than you want. The authors argue that companies can improve the experience of digital entertainment.

Kids aren't known for their impulse control. They will continue to develop it until early adulthood. In the current paradigm, companies take advantage of the fact that engagement tactics work well on kids, spend lots of money making them more effective, and then tell parents that it is difficult to do, as if they haven't made that really difficult to do. The option to block a show here or there isn't a meaningful bulwark against the billions of dollars of algorithmic might.

The stakeholders with the most agency to change are governments and the companies.

Livingstone is trying to identify the box of digital entertainment. It is open-ended and flexible. Some current products have some of these qualities, but they struggle with making money through the play of young people. In the physical world, there are often parks that are free and well-designed to support the physical, mental, and emotional development of young people through play. What would this look like online?

Livingstone says that he's trying to invite designers and digital providers to think more creatively.