Today, with much fanfare, HM Government is rolling out its new policy to protect young people from online harms. Here is a political/legal move for which I am the target audience. I have three teenagers, and for those not so afflicted, let me tell you that keeping them from spending all day, every day goggling at one piece of tech or another is an infernal game of whack-a-mole.

Item: Child One, Instagram. Very, very occasionally, she forgets to delete her browser history and CTRL-H yields page after page after page, hour after hour, of Instagram hits. If you restrict or remove the phone app, it will be re-downloaded or the site opened instead in a browser window. My ISP used to allow an admin to block specific sites at the router, but (as I discovered after around an hour with their tech support), useless Vodafone have removed this feature. After much wrangling, I installed a third-party DNS blocker. Daughter circumvents the router by tethering a device to her mobile data.

Item: Child Two, Snapchat. We currently have two overlapping screen time restrictions: the native iPhone settings and an app called Qustudio which vexes my son and pleases me by blocking his phone apparently at random. Only this morning, I was exchanging messages with his mother about how much time he’s spending on his phone while on an exchange visit to France. In ping the requests – just 15 minutes more, pleeeease – and back and forth go the arguments. Do the different restrictions interfere with each other? Is he circumventing this while we loosen that? Does he really need downtime off so he can listen to music? It’s exhausting.

Saying under-16s should be banned from certain tech is easy to do

Saying under-16s should be banned from certain tech is easy to do

Item: Child Three, YouTube, Minecraft, Rocket League, etc. Finally, and only by standing over his shoulder for ten minutes to make sure that he finishes his game, do you persuade a very resentful 12-year-old to turn off the PlayStation. You go to put the kettle on and return to find he has installed himself on your desktop computer and is watching YouTube shorts. You kick him off the computer and send him upstairs. On following him, you discover he’s found a laptop and is watching........

© The Spectator