What to actually do, by the age your child is now. No scare statistics — just the settings, conversations and habits that make the most difference, and where to go when something has already gone wrong.
Move where devices charge overnight to a shared room, and tell your child that if anything goes wrong online they will not lose the device for telling you. Those two together prevent more harm than any filter.
Advice that suits a six-year-old is useless for a fifteen-year-old, and the shift from supervising to advising is the part most guides skip.
Where devices live matters more than how many minutes are spent on them.
A bedroom is where most late-night use and most unsupervised contact happens. Charging phones and tablets in a kitchen or hallway overnight solves more problems than any app.
Half an hour of a stranger messaging your child is worse than two hours of a film. Time limits are easy to measure, which is why they get all the attention — but what they are doing matters more than how long.
Screen Time on iOS and Family Link on Android are free, already installed, and harder for a child to remove than a third-party app.
Most harm arrives through contact and pressure, not through content a filter would catch.
Cyberbullying is rarely a single insult. It shows up as exclusion from group chats, gossip, impersonation, and secrets being shared on. Children often will not call any of that bullying, so ask about specifics instead.
Reluctance to go to school, headaches and stomach aches, withdrawal from friends, or hiding a screen when you walk past. These show up before a child says anything.
Before there is a problem, agree what you would actually do — block, screenshot, report, tell the school. A child who knows the plan is far likelier to come to you.
The game is usually fine. The chat channel is where the risk sits.
Ten minutes tells you more than any age rating. You will see immediately whether strangers can message your child.
Most consoles and games allow chat limited to friends only. This single setting removes the main route an adult uses to reach a child through a game.
Loot boxes and battle passes are designed to be hard to stop. Remove stored cards and require a password for every purchase.
The boring settings are the ones that actually protect them.
One reused password means one breach unlocks everything. A password manager is easier for a child than remembering rules.
Whoever controls the email address can reset every other account. Start there.
Urgency plus a link. Free skins, an account about to be deleted, a prize. Agree the rule that nothing urgent is ever real, and they can always check with you.
Six questions. Any you cannot answer confidently is a reasonable place to start this week — the list is ordered roughly by how much difference each makes.
These organisations maintain current guidance and, unlike a static page, update it as platforms change. For anything urgent, go to them first.
This guide replaces an earlier infographic series published here around 2019. That version reported survey figures which are no longer current and were largely unattributed, so it has not been carried over. Where numbers matter, the sources above maintain them properly.
Social media
The platforms change constantly; the questions to ask do not.
Know what they actually use
Not what was popular when you last looked. Ask them to show you, and ask what they like about it — that conversation gets further than an audit.
Private by default, then check
Every platform resets or adds settings. Review privacy together every few months rather than assuming last year's settings held.
Location is the one to be strict about
Photo geotags, check-ins and location sharing give away home and school. Turn location off per-app rather than globally, so maps still work.