I'm Alice Hunsberger. Trust & Safety Insider is my weekly rundown on the topics, industry trends and workplace strategies that trust and safety professionals need to know about to do their job. 

Do you use parental controls? Do you find them overwhelming, confusing, and completely different from platform to platform? In this issue I’m going to talk through why standardisation in this area is important — because right now platforms are making all the decisions on what parental controls look like, even though the design of parental controls means answering a lot of values-based questions that do not have clear answers.

Get in touch with questions, comments, feedback, rants, raves, existential problems…. I will be dedicating an upcoming issue of T&S Insider to questions from readers — if there’s anything you want to share, please don’t hesitate.

Here we go! — Alice

How do we standardise something rooted in values?

Do parental controls actually keep kids safer? The research is genuinely mixed. What works depends on the values behind the controls, how they're implemented, and whether they fit the family using them. Some of the effort that goes into building these controls is real safety work; some of it is regulatory and litigation insurance; but a lot of it is duplicative. Every major platform builds its own version of the same features in its own vocabulary, often under pressure to ship something rather than to ship the right thing. And roughly half of parents don't use the parental controls available to them, according to 2025 research from the Family Online Safety Institute and Ipsos. Even as parental controls become more available, adoption remains low. 

Parents are struggling to navigate parental controls because the controls are confusing, but also because the questions parental controls try to answer don't have agreed-upon answers. How much oversight should a parent have over a fourteen-year-old's private messages? How much over a sixteen-year-old's? What counts as age-appropriate content for a teen who's questioning their sexuality in a household where that's not safe to discuss? When does parental visibility become surveillance, and who gets to draw that line? These aren't UX problems. These are values questions, and we as a society have not resolved them.

Rather, we’ve left it up to platforms to answer these questions by shipping features. Trust and safety is how platforms express their values. Every policy decision, default setting, and escalation path is a choice rooted in values, and it’s made on behalf of users who don’t get a say. In other areas, those choices are uncontroversial enough that nobody notices. But parental controls make the platform’s values immediately visible to the parent — and the parent has their own set of values, as do the teens, and the regulator. It’s not often that these groups agree with each other!

The current regulatory climate means that by default, platforms are taking the lead on shaping child safety values: staying compliant is difficult and expensive when the rules vary across jurisdictions. In the US, federal preemption would help with some of this inconsistency but the current administration has made clear that it will use federal agencies against the groups most likely to need platform protections, including LGBTQ+ youth.

So when a platform ships a parental control feature, it's shipping a feature and taking a position on how parents should facilitate their children' s relationship with digital products. These features govern whether teens deserve privacy from their parents, whether parents are entitled to know who their kids are talking to, and whether the platform should help parents enforce rules or help teens push back on them. And every platform is different. A parent supervising a teen across the major apps is currently navigating five or six completely different approaches. Each one asks the parent to learn a different setup flow, a different vocabulary, and a different theory of what a parent's role is supposed to be.

The major platforms have the budget and headcount to ship at this level. Smaller platforms haven't built equivalents, can't afford to, or are waiting to see what compliance ends up looking like before they invest. Either way, the parents using those platforms are navigating something thinner, or even nothing at all.