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 standardize 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.

There's a model for doing this differently

The contested values aren't going anywhere, and it’s not up to the industry to settle them. Instead they can collaborate with the advocates, researchers, and regulators who are already working to make parental controls more accessible. This kind of collaboration could help in standardizing the following:

• A shared vocabulary for what parental controls are and what they do.
• A consistent setup flow that doesn't require parents to learn a new mental model for every app.
• A minimum set of capabilities that every platform offers, with consistent labels.
• Default settings that are configurable but legible to a parent who isn't a power user.
• A shared sense of where supervision settings live in the product.

None of this requires platforms to agree on the underlying values. It requires them to agree that a parent who opens any major app shouldn't have to relearn what supervision means.

When the field collaborates, the floor moves up for everyone — and the field already has a track record for this kind of coordination. Cross-sector working groups have produced shared frameworks for transparency reporting, policy taxonomy, signal sharing, and child safety (as I wrote about recently). How to implement this and who should lead it is a longer conversation. But I do think it's possible that we can meaningfully collaborate across the field in more ways, and begin creating parental control standards that we desperately need.

That said, we don’t want more safety theatre: standardization isn't a substitute for rigorous safety work, and coordination isn't a substitute for accountability. Regulators, advocates, researchers, and users all have roles to play in holding platforms to a standardized baseline once it's set, and in pushing for more when it isn't enough. We need to avoid hastily built controls that are not fit for purpose, inconsistent from product to product, and so confusing that most parents give up pretty much straight away.

And even with coordination, the harder questions don't go away. A parent who finally figures out how to set up supervision across multiple apps still has to decide how much oversight is right for their teen, whether the teen agrees, and what they do when the defaults don't match their family's values. Platforms still have to decide what to show parents and what to protect from them. Regulators still have to decide what to mandate.

But we need to stay focused on what actually protects young users: thoughtful design built in collaboration with the people who actually study and advocate for kids, and features that reflect real safety research and center young users themselves. Coordinating on what works, and making it easier for platforms to implement it, would let T&S teams spend more time on what actually moves the needle on user safety.