To be a guardian means guarding your kids’ phones

10 April 2025

Today we received a message from the Rector at our daughter’s school. Someone in her class had shared offensive & racist messages in the class snapchat group. The incident was then reported to the police. We’re not in the era of just giving a kid a telling off for being an idiot any longer. When she came home I asked my daughter (14) if she’d seen the message and had been troubled by it.

‘No’ she replied, she had not seen the message because she was not in the group.
‘Oh? Why not?’, I asked.
‘I told them I didn’t want to be a part of the group.’
‘Oh? Why not?’
‘You told me people would share stupid stuff I wouldn’t want to see. I thought I didn’t want that.’

Cue moment of intense satisfaction as I get something about parenting right.

We had been slow to let her have Snapchat. I was worried about the disappearing messages, the intense pressure of snapstreaks & the much greater pressure that teenage girls experience. But, for some reason, it had become the chosen medium of communication by virtually all her friends, including her football team. This feeling of social exclusion is not fun for a kid.

Alright then, how do we solve this one? I did some proper reading about Snapchat and began to understand it better. Then I simply had a chat with my daughter. I outlined the benefits, I explained the risks. I explained why we were cautious and the things we wanted to avoid to protect her not exclude her. We agreed some boundaries and I set up the parental controls. She’s happy to let me check her messages from time to time and it causes no friction.

I won’t be able to protect my daughter for ever from harmful, sinful images and messages forever. But her childhood should be a place where she is shielded from as much of that as possible. It is also a time where she can train, hopefully, in the wisdom she needs for adult life. Soon the guardrails she sets up to protect herself will be up to her. I hope that this incident to which she is only adjacent, will lodge in her memory. ‘I avoided harm because of a simple choice to stay out.’

Yet the whole process was pretty stress free from our point of view. She trusts us. We respect her. We set up limits, they understand them and don’t (usually) fight hard against them. But the core message is this: parent’s take seriously your job to protect your kids. That means setting up a fence around their use of social media and training them to see how it works.