The Parent's Playbook

The Parent's Playbook

This is the written version of the take-home playbook from The Parent Feed, our 90-minute parent session. It's organised the way a family actually uses it: what to say, what to write down, what to check, and what to do when something goes wrong.

Nothing here requires you to be technical. Most of it requires you to be consistent, which is harder.

1. The four sentences

Before any setting, any app, any agreement — these four sentences do more work than everything else on this page combined. Say them out loud, more than once, and mean them.

1. "If something online scares you or upsets you, tell me — and you will not lose your device for telling me." This is the entire safety system. Break it once and it stops being true.
2. "Friends are people you have met in real life." The rule that survives contact with reality.
3. "If anyone asks you to move the conversation to a different app, stop and tell me." The single most reliable warning sign that exists.
4. "Assume a screenshot." Before you post, before you send, every time.

2. The family agreement

Write it together, with everyone in the household present, and put it somewhere visible. Four sections:

Device-free times. Meals, the car, the first half-hour after school, and the last hour before bed. Applies to adults too — a rule that exempts the parents isn't a rule, it's a rank.

Where devices sleep. Anywhere that isn't a bedroom. This is the highest-value line in the document.

The consuming number. Sort screen use into creating and connecting, learning, and consuming. Only the third needs a hard limit. Let your child propose the number and adjust it together — one they helped set is one they'll keep.

The bad-week clause. Decide now what happens during exams, illness, or a week when a parent is away. Agreements without exceptions don't bend; they break.

The reasoning is in Screen Time = New Rules?.

3. The monthly five-minute check

Sit down together — with them, not behind them — once a month:

• Open the full app list in Settings, not the home screen
• Ask what each unfamiliar app does. Curiosity gets more information than inspection
• Check who can message and who can see the account on each social app
• Turn location tagging off
• Delete two accounts nobody uses

Detail: The Apps Kids Are Actually Using.

4. The termly twenty-minute check-up

Three times a year, do the longer version:

• Passwords — unique on email first, then anything with money attached
• Two-factor authentication — on for email and the main social account, minimum
• App permissions — location, camera, microphone, contacts, photos
• Old accounts — delete two

Full walkthrough: Privacy and Security Check-Up.

5. Audit yourself first

Parents pick up their phones roughly seventy times a day and consistently underestimate it by about half. Your child's baseline for normal is not your guidance — it's your behaviour.

Look at your own usage dashboard for a week before you propose anything. Then bring your numbers to the conversation first. It changes the entire dynamic: you're not issuing a limit, you're proposing a shared standard you're also bound by.

Uncomfortable detail: Parents, Check Your Own Digital Media Use.

6. When something goes wrong

The first hour matters more than the first week.

1. Lead with the child, not the device. "You've seemed off — what's going on?" opens a door; "what have you been looking at?" closes it.
2. Keep the promise. No confiscation as a response to being told.
3. Screenshot before you block. Username, timestamp and URL visible. Blocking often removes your access to the evidence.
4. Then block and report in the app, and separately to the school's named safeguarding lead.
5. Support the child separately from solving the problem. They're two different jobs.
6. Get help when it's more than a bad week. Persistent distress, changes to eating or sleeping, or refusal to go to school are reasons to involve a school counselor or a qualified professional. You don't need to wait for a threshold.

Signs to watch for: How to Spot a Child Being Cyberbullied.

7. What to do this week

If you do nothing else on this page:

• Say sentence 1 to your child tonight, in those words
• Move every phone in the house out of every bedroom
• Turn on two-factor authentication for your child's email

Three things. Maybe forty minutes. They cover most of the realistic risk.

Want the rest? What Digital Responsibility Actually Means is the reasoning behind all of it, the Digital Safety Glossary decodes the vocabulary, and the Online Safety library has everything else.