i‘m not writing this from the perspective of a parent, but a 23yo Gen Z who’s had parents which didn’t know what to regulate.

in some places my parents regulated „very intensely“. oftentimes they did so quite suddenly and without much communication/ explanation.

then again there were times and places where the lack of regulation allowed me to spend hours and hours each day, doom scrolling on instagram.

i spent years contemplating the situations and what would’ve been good.

your child’s mental health is the main key. in my experience the lack of self regulation is a coping mechanism. i was doing horribly and my parents solution wasn’t to help me, but to play whack a mole with symptoms by regulating. don’t get me wrong tho, it’s not just me, ive seen this a bunch of times with other ppl too. -> the better your kids mental health, the less there will be a need to regulate. if they do struggle, help them by working with them, not against them. look for solutions with them. don’t just set regulations, discuss what to do WITH THEM. let them set targets and what to do if they aren’t met with you. there will be lots of resentment and cheating around restrictions if you don’t work with them. everyone i know who’s been forced into find my or live360 has used a variety of techniques to spoof their location. not to mention that all of them at least kinda hate their parents for it.

so:

• if you want regulations to work, they need to be voluntary.
• ensure good mental health to prevent media abuse as coping mechanism.

they say that strict parents raise liars, and i’ve seen that proven many times.

Hello there!

First off, good for you for looking out for the privacy of others!

Unfortunately, you can’t force privacy onto someone. That has to be a choice the person makes for themself. If you want your teen to live a private life, talk to them about it. Explain the dangers of social media, and don’t try to sidestep the issue, just be honest. Avoid trying to “trick” someone into privacy, because that leads to bad outcomes down the road.

Using GrapheneOS is your best bet for a private phone. If you want to maintain some control over the device, have your teen use a secondary profile and restrict which apps can be installed using the owner profile that only you have access to. This also adds the benefit of being able to restrict access to the device (if that’s your thing) just by restarting it, since the teen won’t be able to unlock it. I’m not here to tell you how to be a parent.

Social media I’m not sure if fediverse stuff is the right path especially for lemmy, since it’s just tech nerd stuff and politics which isn’t interesting really unless they go out of their way to find smaller communities.

I agree with this, and it’s currently a downside to less mainstream social media. It will always be tailored to a specific community until it grows or becomes mainstream. If you really want your teen to use only open source apps, Bluesky is a good open source option while still being mainstream.

My parents probably want tracking features so it’ll probably be Find My or a 3rd party app like life360

You can talk with them about alternatives, such as an Airtag or other similar devices, or having no tracking at all. One point you can bring up is that it’s quite easy to trick those tracking apps (turning off the device, turning off location, turning on Airplane Mode, using a mock location app, leaving the device at home, etc.) so they aren’t very useful. Again, I’m not here to tell you how to parent.

It’s just kinda hard trying to blend being a functional member of society and maintain your mental well being and privacy.

This is why privacy is a choice. It’s up to the person how private they want to be, but the most you can do is educate about privacy and raise some alternatives.

In general, it depends on how much control you want to have over the digital life of your teen. The more control you have, the less autonomy the teen has and the more likely it is that the teen will resent the practices you put in place. However, the less control you have, the higher the risk of bad things happening. It’s up to you which path to take. Something I learned is that you can never have total control, because people are crafty, but people are also very understanding and can adapt to their environment.

Hope this helps!

Proton VPN, RethinkDNS are two good things to get.

Or if you can pay, Proton unlimited, which comes with a lot of stuff from proton, and NextDNS

Edit: NextDNS is a separate service that isn’t affiliated with proton in any way. If you want to make logs on your nexDNS account, store them in switzerland only, never the US and never the EU only switzerland…for privacy reasons.

I think authoritarianism is a giant mistake and only creates duplicitous behavior. In my opinion tracking is ridiculous. None of us existed like this and ended up fine. In my opinion, all of this nonsense is acting as a stand in for relationships and real parenting. Humans make decisions and develop ethics based upon trust and autonomy. By stealing that factor of trust and autonomy, and replacing it with authoritarianism a parent is stunting the child’s growth of independent ethics and character. Make compelling discussions of why they should do whatever thing, but let them decide their own path. The lack of compelling discussions and real trust that requires risk is a major factor in the problems that exist in the present world.

The one time you actually need to know where your kid is at because something has happened, you will not know because you have taught them that the only path to independence is to turn off the device and put it into a Faraday cage like pouch, or someone else will do so. If you have a fundamentally trusting relationship with open dialog and respect for their autonomy, they will tell you openly exactly where they are going and any potential for danger. If you can handle that information without allowing anxiety to overwhelm reasoning skills, you will be in a far better position to help them if something bad happens.

The most long term valuable aspect of schooling is the development of one’s social network and connections, along with the habits and ethics. The actual information learned is rather limited in valuable application in the end. Who one knows and how one appears to others is of far more value than what one knows. For these reasons, there may be value in corporate social media. Simply teach the kid to understand how these places are both a trap and a tool. A trap, in that many of the smartest humans are manipulating users in ways that are nearly impossible for the users to escape. Never invest emotions into such a trap. Use the tool if needed for external social benefits, but use it as a manipulation tool with a layer of disconnect from who you really are. Teach them to use a work profile to isolate any apps from their device. That is just how I look at the issue.

You can’t stop them but you can help them learn to make good choices on their own.

If you scroll down to where this reply will end up:

Iphone is the right place to start. The parental controls are well thought out and have enough granularity for almost anyone and “find my” works great along with location sharing.

They have a bunch of built in privacy, mental health and use monitoring stuff so the person with the phone can use that themselves too.

It’s the most normal person phone there is so no chance they’ll be embarrassed or feel left out and because the platform is so common (assuming USA because “grades”) you’ll have an easy time coordinating with other parents and sharing how you’re dealing with stuff as they grow.

Good luck.