Fourteen to seventeen. What's still worth doing.

By this age most technical controls are either bypassable or counterproductive. That doesn't mean doing nothing — it means changing what you're trying to achieve, from prevention to a floor plus a relationship.

Be realistic about what you control

A 16-year-old has a phone on cellular data, friends with unfiltered phones, a school laptop, and the ability to research any workaround in a minute. They are outside your house for most of their waking hours.

Controls at this age do three things: block the genuinely harmful categories, remove the accidental exposure, and signal what you care about. They do not prevent a determined teenager from reaching anything. Building your approach on the assumption that they do is how families end up with a teenager who has learned to manage them.

What's still worth keeping

1. Filtering on the genuinely harmful categories. Self-harm and pro-eating-disorder content, scam and phishing sites, malware. These aren't about morality — they're about not having damaging material delivered by a recommendation engine at 1am.
2. Overnight phone-out-of-bedroom. Increasingly unpopular and still the highest-value rule available. Sleep affects mood, judgement, and school more than almost anything else you can influence.
3. Location sharing, mutually. Both ways, agreed, framed as safety not tracking. Many teenagers accept this readily when it's reciprocal.
4. Financial controls. Purchase approval, no stored card. This is about scams and impulse spending, not trust.
5. An emergency route. A panic button, or a codeword text that means "call me and give me a reason to leave, no questions."

What to drop

1. Reading messages. If you're still doing it, stop, and say you've stopped. It produces concealment and costs you the disclosure that actually catches problems.
2. Blanket social media bans. They don't hold at this age, and they push everything onto accounts you don't know about.
3. Hard daily time caps. Move to agreed expectations. A 16-year-old needs to be practising self-regulation, because in two years nobody will be doing it for them.
4. Approving every app. Notifications are fine; approval becomes a fight with no upside.
5. Website allowlists. Unworkable and guaranteed to produce a bypass.

The things that actually matter at this age

1. Being the person they tell

Nearly every serious online harm to a teenager — sextortion, grooming, a coerced image, a scam, harassment — gets substantially worse the longer it stays secret. In almost every case where it resolved well, the teenager told an adult early.

What determines whether they tell you isn't your filtering. It's whether they believe the response will help rather than punish. That belief is built in advance, through how you handled the small things.

Say it explicitly, more than once: "If something happens online that scares you — even if you broke a rule, even if you sent something, even if it's your fault — tell me. You will not lose your phone. I will help you sort it out." Then honour it the first time it's tested, because that's the only test that counts.

2. Specific knowledge, not general warnings

"Be careful online" is meaningless. These are not:

• Sextortion. How it works, that it happens in hours, that paying makes it worse, that it's happened to a lot of people, and exactly what to do.
• Image law. That any sexual image of someone under 18 is illegal to possess or share — including of themselves, including one sent to them. A great many teenagers do not know this.
• Take It Down. That takeitdown.ncmec.org exists and removes images of minors from major platforms. Knowing this exists changes how survivable the situation feels.
• How recommendation feeds work. That engagement shapes what they're shown, and that a feed can be retrained.

3. Loosening visibly

Controls that relax as they get older teach that autonomy is earned and given. Controls that stay identical from 12 to 17 teach that the only route to autonomy is to take it without asking. Say what changes and when.

A reasonable 16-year-old setup

• Filtering on self-harm, pro-eating-disorder, scam, and malware categories. Adult content is a family decision — be honest with yourself about whether the filter is achieving anything or just signalling.
• No monitoring, no message reading, and they know that.
• Mutual location sharing.
• Phone out of the bedroom overnight.
• Purchase approval.
• Panic button or codeword arrangement.
• Standing, repeated, honoured: telling you never costs them the phone.