How Your Kids Outsmarted Parental Controls
This engaging article from The Wall Street Journal details the arms race taking place in American homes. Concerned parents use internet blocking and filtering techniques on their tech devices while their children are diligently figuring out how to beat them. Spoiler alert: kids win.
Consider Lance Walker, a 43-year-old Colorado real estate broker, and his 11-year-old daughter, Peyton. When Lance discovered that Peyton was receiving messages from adult men on TikTok, he went into Apple’s parental controls and blocked them. But Peyton logged in with a new Apple ID to use TikTok and locked the password for her father.
“It was a nightmare,” Walker told the Journal . He is reportedly still trying to figure out how to control his daughter’s TikTok habit.
This is a particularly challenging issue because children are often better tech savvy than their parents and almost always have more free time to find workarounds than their parents to set limits.
It’s hard to give too specific information on how to restrict content because most of it has to do with the type of content you want to block, for which apps or services, but here are some tips to get you started.
Using Apple iOS Parental Controls
Every major operating system offers a way to block users from inappropriate content, but since most kids ( 87 percent of teens in a recent survey ) use an iPhone or iPad, most parents should check out the iOS Screen Time tool. It allows you to filter out adult content, prevent purchases, and set time limits for phone use or for certain types of applications (for example, banning games after 8:00 pm).
For most parents, this probably provides all the protection they need. But if your child is determined to access and override the controls, it’s not that hard.
How kids can bypass parental controls on iPhone and iPad
According to protectyoungeyes.com , your child can override parental controls if they use their own Apple ID and reset their device to factory defaults (smart kids will set up their apps and data backups to iCloud first). If you use parental controls to set time limits, kids can uninstall and then reinstall an app that has timed out, or change the time zone on the device itself to give themselves a few extra hours. (You can block jettisoning , but are you really thinking about it?)
However, the main solution to bypass iOS parental controls is to gain access to the PIN that you use to lock the device. They may look over your shoulder as you type, or even notice spots on the screen. In theory, since the password is only four digits long, kids could use a brute-force cracker on a separate PC or Mac to figure out the password for an iTunes backup file . Do you see what the parents are fighting against?
Setting up parental controls at the router level
If your child is trying to bypass a blockage based on the operating system you install on their devices, you might want to consider a well-protected router to block the entire network. Most routers have at least some parental controls, but some make it a selling point , offering the ability to filter content in general, contribute to the whitelist or blacklist specific websites, control and monitor devices on your network, set time limits and much more. There are even subscription-based hardware solutions such as Disney’s Circle , which promises parental controls that “allow you to control screen time and control not only some, but ALL websites and apps.” Surely this is enough to control your child’s screen time? Not if they are smart.
How kids can bypass router based security
Here is a non-exhaustive list of ways that someone could potentially bypass router-level security. Not all of these tips (taken from techdetox.com ) will work with every security setting, but these are just a few of the possible methods. And I’m sure there are other workarounds as well:
- Finding out your password is the simplest and most effective solution.
- Google your default router password and use that. (Did you forget to change the default password on your router?)
- Set up a VPN: A VPN set up on your child’s phone may bypass security features on some routers.
- Disable your parental control router.
- Proxy Site Access: If your child wants to go to a particular site, they can enter it through a proxy. Known proxy sites are probably already blocked by parental software, but new ones always appear, and I bet your child will know about them sooner than you or your filtering software.
- Bypass the router using the phone’s hotspot function.
- Use your neighbor’s Wi-Fi.
You can just pick up their phone
In another example from the Wall Street Journal, Chad Bullock, a sales manager for a tech company, explained his three-tiered approach to keeping his 14-year-old son Parker in control of over-gaming. Bullock says he uses Google Family Link , Bark and Circle , a hardware-based and subscription-based filter. Parker got around it all by forging the MAC address of his mom’s phone.
After all, there is no software that can replace parenting a child that respects your constraints. A technical challenge is likely to have the opposite effect of a deterrent. For parents, navigating the Byzantine world of parental controls is likely to be a tedious nightmare, but for a smart kid with a hacker personality, figuring out how to bypass internet restrictions is fun , like hacking cable TV for free movie channels was fun for me. when I was a child.
If your child is old enough to bypass parental controls, he or she is old enough to understand why he or she must comply with the restrictions you set. So this is not really a technological problem; this is a more serious boundary and rule enforcement issue that no filtering software can solve. Maybe just pick up their phone.