My husband walked past our son's room a few weeks ago and stopped cold.

There was a man's voice in there. An adult voice, having a full back-and-forth conversation with our 13-year-old. My husband walked in- “who are you talking to?”

It was ChatGPT. In voice mode. My son was editing a film and asking it questions about the software, and it was easier to listen to the answers than read them while he worked.

Our son found this hilarious. You don't know anything about AI.

He was right and that's sort of the whole point of this issue.

Our kids are ahead of us on this, and they will stay ahead of us. We are not going to out-tech them. But there are a handful of settings that genuinely help, most parents don't know they exist, and they take about ten minutes total.

So here they are, plus the part that matters more than any of them.

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1. YOU CAN TURN OFF YOUTUBE SHORTS

I've been telling friends about this one for a while, and every single time the reaction is shocking.

YouTube now has a real setting, and it's buried where nobody would look:

YouTube app → tap your profile picture → Settings → Time management → Shorts feed limit → 0 minutes

This shuts off the endless scrolling feed, which is the thing that eats an afternoon. Individual Shorts can still turn up in search results or subscriptions. But the autoplay, where you look up and forty minutes are gone that closes.

Do this on your own phone first. You'll notice the difference in a day.

On a laptop: browser extensions like Unhook let you strip out Shorts, the sidebar, and recommendations entirely. If your kid does homework on a computer with YouTube open, this is the one that matters.

2. WHOLE-HOUSE CONTROLS BEAT DEVICE CONTROLS

I use an app called Circle. It sits on our home network, so I assign devices to each kid and control what happens on them. I can switch off Instagram, switch off YouTube, filter specific sites, or pause the entire internet from my teenager’s phone.

I first tried Apple's built-in Screen Time limits on my younger son's iPad. Set the limit, set a passcode, done.

He cracked the passcode immediately. He knows the numbers I typically use. The message popped up saying he'd hit his limit and he just typed his way past it and carried on. Both my kids found this extremely funny. Mommy, that's not going to work.

The network-level version works better for one reason: there's nothing to bypass. It's not a pop-up asking for a code. The wifi just stops.

I don't run it on a schedule. I use it when they show no sign of stopping the scrolling. When it happens occasionally, they think the wifi is being the wifi. The internet's broken again, we need a new router. They get frustrated for about four minutes and then they go find something else to do.

If I used it every day at the same time, they'd work it out in a week. Scarcity is doing a lot of the work here.

3. AI HAS PARENTAL CONTROLS 

If your kid uses ChatGPT for homework, this is worth ten minutes.

ChatGPT has a parental controls dashboard now. You link your account to your teen's, and once linked you can reduce sensitive content, set quiet hours that block access overnight, turn off voice mode, limit image generation, and switch on Study Mode as the default which makes it walk a kid through a problem instead of just handing them the answer.

Setup: Settings → Parental Controls → Add family members.

It isn't the homework that concerns me. It's that kids are increasingly talking to these things. Not looking things up, confiding. Quiet hours and content settings are a reasonable floor under that.

4. CHECK YOUR PICKUPS, NOT JUST YOUR HOURS

Screen time totals are the number everyone looks at. The more revealing one is how many times a day the phone gets picked up.

Both iPhone and Android show this. For a lot of people it's north of a hundred. That's not a two-hour block of watching something, that's a hundred small interruptions, which is a completely different problem and doesn't show up in an hours-per-day number at all.

Worth checking on their device. Also worth checking on yours.

Honestly,I don't have any restrictions on my own phone. I didn't grow up with this, so I'm not on it for hours, but I've absolutely stayed up too late because a video led to another video.

THE PART THAT MATTERS MORE THAN ANY OF THIS

My kids almost never ask me why something is switched off. They know why. They're old enough to know they've been on it too long. What happens instead is the reverse. They have to come to me with a reason to turn it back on.

My older son will appear and say the wifi isn't working and I'll ask what he’s watching and mostly it’s tutorials on how to edit a film. He's obsessed with making movies. He was learning something.

So I turned it back on.

The settings aren't the parenting. The settings are what creates the moment where the parenting happens.

Every control in this issue can be defeated by a determined 10-year-old, mine cracked the passcode in an afternoon. The controls are a speed bump that makes your kid come find you, and then you get to ask what they're actually doing.

A Note for My Fellow Laid-Back Parents

I am never going to be the most technically capable person in my house, that ship sailed. My 13-year-old is teaching me and my husband about AI. So I've stopped trying to win on that front.

What I can do is put a few reasonable things in place, use them sparingly enough that they still work, and stay curious enough to ask what they're actually doing instead of assuming.

Ten minutes of settings. Then the real work, which is just talking to them.

See you next week,
Lakshmi 💛

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