Talking with your kids about what they do online
Three pages — the videos they watch, the places where other people can reach them, and the AI they are already using. It is a phone most of the time, but it is also the computer and the television. Each page is the parent’s half of something your child can read for themselves, and each is about what to say and when to worry rather than which app to ban. Coaching, not policing.
If you read one paragraph
The thing that matters most
Your child has to believe they can come to you after a mistake without losing the phone.
Nearly every story that ends badly has the same middle: something went wrong, the young person was more frightened of their parents’ reaction than of the person hurting them, and so they said nothing for days or weeks while it got worse.
You cannot establish this in the moment. It has to be said out loud beforehand, more than once, in plain words: if anything ever goes wrong on there, you come to me, and I promise my first reaction will be to help you, not to take your phone. And then it has to be true the first time it is tested, which is the hard part.
That one promise does more for your child’s safety than every filter, timer and monitoring app put together. The rest of this is detail.
- The videos they watch YouTube and TikTok. Comparison, the edited highlight, and why an infinite feed is a design choice rather than a character flaw. Aim at the feeling, not the app.
- Where people can reach them The settings worth one evening, what grooming and sextortion actually look like, and exactly what to do if it has already happened. The most important page of the three.
- AI chatbots Your child is already using one. The difference between an assistant and a companion app, the homework conversation, and when it has started replacing people. Banning it outright is the one approach that reliably fails.
Three habits that run through all of it
Be curious before you are worried
Ask to be shown a favorite video, a favorite creator, what the group chat is actually like. Interest buys credibility; worry spends it. You also cannot discuss something you have never seen, and ten minutes of looking tells you more than a month of wondering.
Ask questions instead of making points
A question invites them to spot the thing themselves, and something they worked out is something they keep. A verdict invites them to defend the phone. Every page here has specific questions on it.
Aim at the feeling, not the app
“You are on that thing too much” is about you. “You seemed flat after that — is it still fun?” is about them. The goal is not a supervised child; it is a young person who can notice this is making me feel worse and put it down on their own. Every phone eventually stops being supervised, and that instinct is the only part that carries over.
What your child’s version does and does not say
Worth knowing before you hand over a link. Their pages are written for somebody who is already using these things, and they are careful not to introduce anything to a young person who has not met it — so they do not describe how extortion works, they do not list the kinds of app that act like a person, and they do not name the reporting services. Those are all here instead.
Where their page would need that detail, it says one thing: tell an adult tonight, you are not in trouble. The detail then lives with you, which is the way round it should be.
Their pages also never mention these ones. That is not about keeping anything from them — you are welcome to show them any of it. It is that a young person who can see the script their parent is working from tends to answer the script rather than the parent, and the point of all of this is the conversation, not the material.
What this is not
There are no statistics on these pages. There is nothing here about filtering software, and nothing claiming that any particular app is destroying a generation. Those arguments are had elsewhere by people with more data than a stake website has.
What is here is the plain mechanics of how these things work, written twice — once for a young person and once for you — so that a family can read the same thing and then talk about it.
If something has already happened
If your child is being extorted over an image, or an adult has been contacting them, go straight to that section. It has the steps and the numbers, and the first one is that your child is not in trouble.
These pages are maintained by the Sioux Falls South Dakota Stake. Nothing here is a Church program or policy, and none of it is professional advice. This is not an official website of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.