Most of the children around here get their first smartphone at the age of 12. At school they get thaught about the risks of the internet and social media but parents are also asked to guide their children on this path.

Before that age most schilderen have access to a tablet and the advice there is to only let it be used in the places where you as a parent are present. Not in their room for example. You don’t have to hover above them but just being near and checking the tablet every few days or weeks will do.

Same with gaming consoles or computers. We have them in our living room so our children only use them in those spaces where other people can be around. That way we can hear their conversations and intervene when their are getting too loud or make sure they use proper language.

No real software limitations apart from adblockers. I did block a whole list of porn sites when they were younger than 12 bit after that age I took away all the restrictions on my router. We had a conversation on the impact and consequences of porn but they will be curious and will find or encounter porn eventually.

So, I would say. Teach and supervice your child and make sure they have the appropriate age for or are to be trusted with their devices.

Pixel with grapheneOS

This is unfortunately why I moved the kids devices to iPhone/iPad.

I was not able to find any native methods of locking things down without involving third parties collecting a ton of data.

In iOS I can set their account as a child account, which then lets me

• limit what applications they can launch
• what websites they can visit
• how much screen time they spend in an app or category of apps
• disable in app purchases
• disable pop up advertisements in app
• require approval from parent account for any app download (including free)
• remove ability to delete apps or change specific settings

all with the native iOS settings

Easy. They can have a phone when they can buy one for themselves. By that point they should be mature enough for just about anything

I would say keep using basic security stuff like dns ad/malware/non-child-friendly content blockers, and (more importantly) educate them so they know how to stay safe. If you aren’t handing them an iPhone with their own instagram account as soon as they turn 2 you are doing better than a lot of parents. As a kid (high school age) I can tell you that they will figure out ways around anything you put on there but as long as they understand internet security they won’t want to bypass it.

I can’t tell you how to parent, obviously, but kids and phones are a hairy subject

Neither iOS nor Android provide good APIs for real parental controls. They have MDM profiles that can do the job, but apps that use those for parental controls get removed or are tolerated out of their legacy presence. I wouldn’t trust anything but Google Family Link or a similar integrated parental control solution, to be honest. Kids are smart and they’ll find a way around restrictions eventually, but you can delay the inevitable as long as possible through something that kids can’t delete by hitting the right button sequence.

Open source apps intended to be privacy friendly alternatives all seem to come with the warning that you need to disable battery optimisations or the app will be killed by the OS, and that’s just not something you can prevent if the phone leaves your sight. If push comes to shove, anyone can boot a phone into Safe Mode (a mode in which Android only loads system applications and prevent user installed apps from opening) from which any app can be removed or disabled. This is done by holding down the right volume button(s) at the right time in the boot process (and happens accidentally).

Play Protect should guard against most malware. There are other antivirus apps but they’re often not free or privacy-preserving. Online scams can be prevented by using the browser’s native Safe Browsing feature (which either submits hashes or works offline depending on the configuration you choose for it).

Maybe it goes without saying, but if you’ve pulled software from open source websites or F-Droid, you’ll need to retract the permissions for the browser and/or unmanaged app stores to install new apps.

Unfortunately, you need to provide whatever safety system you use with some information or it won’t be able to do anything, and unless you want to be on call all day to hand out generated activation codes, you’ll probably want some kind of remote interface to deal with “kid needs to do homework but spent their internet time on silly videos” problems when they do inevitably show up.

Make sure your DNS blocking also works outside of WiFi. Your home solution may let through unexpected surprises when the phone switches back to the mobile carrier connection. NextDNS and such should work, a local pihole won’t.

Make sure that you need a full password and authentication flow if you’ve ever attached any kind of payment information to your kids’ or your parent accounts. Many kids are addicted to Roblox microtransactions and you never know what tricks the other kids at school may teach. You wouldn’t be the first parent to find a thousand dollars disappear into Roblox after a kid put their parent’s finger on the fingerprint scanner.

If your kid is allowed to download games, make sure they don’t download the virus-infected knock-offs. They’re not hard to recognise if you’re looking for them, but thousands of people fall for these things every year.

Make sure to set the appropriate age on your kids’ accounts. If they’re under 13, a lot of websites will take some additional privacy measures (or refuse service) because COPPA is no joke. I would also suggest assisting your kid for any app that needs an account to make sure they don’t lie about their age; apps may not work (as well) with kid accounts, but that’s for their own protection.

If they’re 13 or older, you’ll probably gain more through trust, understanding, and a healthy balance between privacy and safety than through stuffing phones full of monitoring apps. I’ve seen parents use controlling apps on 17 year old kids and I don’t believe for a second that those kids will ever come to their parents if they struggle with something because of the sheer lack of trust the constant monitoring displays.

Controversial as it may be, I wouldn’t recommend custom ROMs and all that stuff unless the phone is severely out of date. Most custom ROMs are made to give the user as much freedom and control as possible, and in this instance freedom should be somewhat restricted and control should be in your hands.

Having worked on the supply side of parental control stuff for a short while, I would advice to try to use punitive restrictions only as a last ditch effort. “No Youtube for a week” is not necessarily a bad punishment, but if you hand out such restrictions too arbitrarily, you’ll create more friction against the controls you put in place than when you make clear rules. That friction can be the spark for your kid getting the rebel hacker mindset, but I don’t think it’s worth it if that mindset develops as a means to fight you specifically.

Also periodically re-evaluate your restrictions; kids grow up fast, and the restrictions you’ve set a year ago may have become too strict! I’ve seen parents’ control panels that have set up their kids’ phones when they were 12. All kids obviously found a way around the restrictions, and I wasn’t surprised with a strict 30 minute screen time limit per day at the age of 15.

Getting in the way of kids developing their autonomy with restrictions is how you get into “secret second phone stashed in a drawer” situations, which are unfortunately common enough that I know at least two people who have done that; they moved out for college and don’t seem to visit their parents all that often. I definitely believe that you’re taking measures to protect your children, not punish them, but they need to know that too!

As there’s been a few mentions of apple/ios in the thread : https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/en-ww/parent-disclosure/

There are several concerning, though unsurprising things to note, considering they collect data themselves, and have their own growing ad business :

“We may also use their information for internal purposes such as auditing, data analysis, and research.”

“ Strategic Partners At times, Apple may make certain personal information available to strategic partners that work with Apple to provide products and services, or that help Apple market to customers. Personal information from your child will be shared by Apple only to provide or improve our products and services; it will not be shared with third parties for their marketing purposes. “ and more . Might be of interest to some. The above quotes are both regarding Children’s data.

Anything other than whitelist-type parental controls will likely be insufficient to block absolutely everything you don’t want them to have access to (or want to have access to them, for that matter).

Honestly, the best way to do so would be no internet access without supervision, which is usually not really a viable option in any reasonable real-world scenario.

The second best way I can think of, albeit a slightly technical solution, is to setup a VPN server at home using a raspberry pi or a similar hosting solution and have the phone connect through that. That way you can control internet access in any way you’d like and even block nasty tracking attempts from apps if you so wish. Most android phones have the option to prevent internet access entirely if not connected to the VPN (this will prevent internet access from any WiFi and mobile data networks). In which case they can still just call or text in emergency situations. The only thing left to do is locking down the phone’s settings, and the rest can be dynamically managed from your network.

All of this does require some basic networking knowledge, but it’s actually surprisingly easy to setup.

As a grapheneos user, I’d say it’s very well suited for that.

(optionally self-hosted, or completely offline, or on their server) TimeLimit.io should be mentioned.
is even on fdroid

What i’ll do is buy the oldest android you can find, somewhere within 4.4 and install all the privacy safe apps that lock kids from certain sites and such. Hide everything, make it look like it’s a new android (they’ll never know) and watch as they question on why android apps and current hack tricks aren’t working.

Mentioned below another comment but want to post it independently as well:

I have used TimeLimit. It works completely local on the phone with the option to run it online if earned.