Parenting in the digital age can be stressful and demands a lot from parents.

The Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI) recently released its annual Online Safety Survey that discovered almost 50 per cent of parents surveyed aren’t using parental controls to manage their children’s devices. These are tools that would ostensibly help parents filter out inappropriate content or unwanted interactions on their children’s devices.

The FOSI authors conclude the reason parents aren’t using the tools is because they feel “overwhelmed” and recommend parents educate themselves as a good first step toward broader use.

While overwhelm is a real thing, we suggest a bigger problem with parental controls is how they are designed. This includes how little attention is given to supporting open communication between parents and children.

Once a year for the past three years, we’ve asked the same 33 children (initially aged six to 12) what they think about content ratings, online safety, game monetization and privacy. Our team’s combined expertise in communication, education, policy and game studies analyzed their answers.

We also asked their parents how they mediated their kids’ gaming. Nearly half of them don’t use parental controls either. They say parental controls don’t always work as promised, offer little context about how settings affect gameplay and force binary choices that don’t align with household rules or with children’s maturity levels.

The parents we asked said they aren’t avoiding parental........

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