Rules
Part of Age by age guidance: why there is no age table
Age-by-age guidance changes: the one clock that actually matters
Age-by-age guidance changes on three clocks, only one of which matters most: a twice-yearly review agenda, and what should never be reopened in it.
Most households do not change their age-by-age guidance. They set something up once, during a week when it mattered, and then leave it. What changes underneath is the child, and the mismatch grows quietly until it surfaces as an argument that seems to be about a phone and is not.
So this page is not a forecast. It is about noticing change while it is still cheap to respond to, and about which changes are worth responding to at all.
What to take away
- Three things are changing at once and at different speedsyour child, the services they use, and the rules. Only one of those is worth reorganizing your household around.
- A setting that fitted last year and has not been touched since is not caution. It is a signal that nobody has looked recently.
- Loosening something on purpose, and saying that is what you are doing, is worth more than the same freedom taken quietly a month later.
- Some things should never be part of a review. The promise that telling you costs them nothing is one of them.
Three clocks, and what changes by age
Your child, fastest. Twelve months is an enormous distance at this age. Friendships reorganize, what they care about changes, and their capacity to reason about consequences moves in visible steps. The National Library of Medicine keeps a general page on teenage development if you want the ordinary shape of that described neutrally. This is the clock that should be driving your decisions, and it is the one least likely to appear in an article about what has changed this year.
13 and under. The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and its implementing Rule (16 CFR Part 312) set the under-13 line: platforms must get verifiable parental consent before collecting personal information from a child under 13. Most mainstream platforms therefore set 13 as the minimum age. The guidance at this stage is concrete and supervised: accounts private, direct messages limited, the device in shared space, and no app installs without a look. What changes: many children move from a hand-me-down device to their own, and the first group chats start.
14 to 15. Peer approval peaks and privacy becomes a need, not a phase. Guidance shifts from controls you run to agreements they help write. Check platform defaults rather than adding another app. Instagram Teen Accounts, TikTok Family Pairing, Snapchat Family Center, YouTube supervised experiences and Discord Family Center all offer some version of this, but what they cover differs.
16 to 17. Independence is the point. Guidance moves from monitoring to safety planning: who they can reach, how they get home, what they do when a message turns threatening. Many parental controls age out or become counterproductive; sleep, driving and work schedules matter more than settings.
18. Legal adulthood. Account controls belong to them. The useful change is making sure they know how to report, block and preserve evidence on their own.
The services, next. Interfaces move, settings get renamed, defaults reset, features arrive and disappear. Instagram began rolling out Teen Accounts in September 2024, defaulting under-16 accounts to private, limiting messages and adding sleep mode. TikTok's Family Pairing and Restricted Mode, Snapchat's Family Center and Ghost Mode, YouTube's supervised experiences and Take a Break, and Discord's Family Center and Safe Direct Messaging all change what a parent can see or set. Almost none of it is announced in a way that reaches parents. The practical effect is not that anything dramatic happens, but that a configuration you set up carefully has quietly stopped meaning what it meant.
The rules, slowest and loudest. This area has been actively legislated for several years, and proposals, court cases and enacted rules all get reported in the same excited register. A headline is not evidence that anything applies to you today. In the United States, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and its implementing Rule (16 CFR Part 312), enforced by the Federal Trade Commission, set the under-13 line for collecting children's data. COPPA has been in force since 2000, and the Rule was last amended in 2013. The FTC maintains material on children's online privacy, which is a better starting point than coverage. Elsewhere, the equivalent starting point is your national data protection authority—for example, the Information Commissioner's Office in the UK or the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. Several different kinds of rule share the same word, and working out which one a headline is about removes most of the alarm.
The review that keeps the other two honest
Put half an hour in the calendar twice a year. Not because something will have gone wrong, but because nothing will have been looked at.
Twice-yearly review agenda
- What did we actually enforce?
- What is solving an outgrown problem?
- What has appeared that nothing covers?
- What did the platforms change?
- What are we loosening?
Do it with your child where their age allows, which by the middle years is most of it. A review they attended produces different behavior from one they were told the outcome of.
An agenda that fits in half an hour:
- What did we actually enforce?Not what is written down. Which rules were applied in the last six months, and which quietly stopped being applied. Delete the second group or start meaning them, because a rule nobody applies teaches that rules are decorative.
- What is solving a problem they have outgrown?Almost every household has at least one control still running against a much younger child. Name it and remove it.
- What has appeared that nothing covers?A new app, a new group, a new device in the house, a friend with a much looser setup, a job, a bus route.
- What did the platforms change?Open the actual settings rather than trusting your memory of them, on each account and each device. Ten minutes, twice a year, catches nearly everything that has reset.
- What are we loosening?Decide one thing in advance and hand it over deliberately. This is the point of the whole exercise.
Say what you are doing while you do it. A control removed with an explanation is a stage passed. The same control removed silently teaches nothing, and the same control kept without explanation teaches something worse.
Telling a real change from a repackaged one
Three tests, applied to anything you read about, including on your device.
Is this change real?
Does it change what a user can do?
real change, act on it
only a menu rename, ignore
Does it change what a user can do, or only what a menu is called?
Is it live, or announced?
Does it reach the thing you were worried about?
What should not be in the review
Some things are not settings, and they should not be renegotiated every six months.
Keep out of the review
- The promise that telling you won't cost the phone
- The night and sleep boundary
- Anything you cannot observe
- The direction of travelreviews should loosen
The promise that coming to you about something that has gone wrong will not cost them their phone. If that is ever traded away in a review, the review has done more harm than the rule it changed. Keep it out of scope and say so.
The night, in whatever form your household has settled on. Sleep is the one area where a boundary keeps paying for itself at every age, and it is worth defending as a claim about sleep rather than about their friends. Screen-time habits covers making that argument without a fight.
Anything you cannot observe. If a rule was unobservable last year it is still unobservable now, and reviewing it just moves the fiction along.
And the direction of travel. Reviews should loosen. A review that only ever tightens tells your child that cooperation buys nothing, which is precisely the lesson that makes the next few years harder.
When a change is not a review question
If something has actually happened, deal with the thing rather than the configuration. Tightening the settings after a disclosure reads as a punishment for telling you and addresses none of what happened.
A change in your child lasting weeks rather than days, touching sleep, school, eating and friendships at once, with things they used to enjoy quietly dropped, is not a scheduling matter.
Take it to your family doctor or the school. You do not need to be certain, or to have worked out what it is, before asking. Mental wellbeing covers what that conversation looks like.
If they say anything about not wanting to be here, or about hurting themselves, treat it as serious the first time and get help the same day. If a child is in immediate danger, contact emergency services first.
Common questions
Twice a year sounds like a lot. Is once enough?
Once a year plus whenever a new device or a new school year arrives will catch most of it. What matters is that it happens on a calm day rather than after something has gone wrong, because a review held after an incident will be understood as a search.
My child refuses to sit through a review.
Do the settings part alone and the loosening part with them. The half that needs their attendance is the half where something is handed over, and few teenagers refuse that meeting.
Nothing has changed since last time. Have we wasted half an hour?
No. The most common finding is a rule nobody has applied for months, and noticing that is worth the time on its own.
Should I tell them what I found in the settings?
Yes, all of it, including anything that had quietly reset. A configuration your child can describe is one they have no reason to go looking through.
This page is general information for parents, not medical or legal advice. For how the underlying stages work, see age-by-age guidance; for writing the changes down so they do not have to be reargued, see family agreements.
