The Phone in Your Kid’s Pocket

Twenty dads gave up a Saturday morning last month to come to the RGV Dads Summit, and the first thing I asked all twenty of them to do was take out their phone. Not to put it away. To use it, because we were going to change settings together right there in the room, and I told them that if they walked out with nothing on their phone different then I had wasted their Saturday.

I spent a month getting ready for that talk. I have worked in technology for twenty five years and I went in thinking I understood this subject. What I found while I was building it changed how I talk to my own kids, and a good part of it had nothing to do with settings at all.

I wrote separately about the lawsuits piling up against these companies and what they mean for families and for businesses. This piece is the other half. This one is about what you and I actually do on a Tuesday night.

Start with the honest part

Parental controls are speed bumps. They are not walls. Any teenager who really wants around what you set up tonight will get around it, and later in this piece I will show you exactly how they do it. That sounds like a reason to skip the whole thing. It is not. A speed bump does not stop a car either, but it slows the car down enough that you can see it coming, and that is the entire job. These settings buy you time and they buy you information. They do not buy you safety.

The real danger is not the kid who beats the controls. It is the dad who switches everything on, feels like the problem is handled, and stops paying attention. I would rather you leave here a little worried and still watching than confident and asleep.

Our kids here are on it more than most

The Pew Research Center surveyed teenagers aged thirteen to seventeen in the fall of 2025, and one number in that research is specifically about us. Fifty two percent of Hispanic teens said they are online almost constantly, compared to twenty seven percent of white teens. That is not a number to be ashamed of and it is not a verdict on anybody’s parenting. It is context. Our kids in the Valley are living on these phones more than the national average, which means the conversations at our kitchen tables have to be a little more direct than the ones happening somewhere else.

There is good news in the same research that almost nobody reports. Across all teenagers, the share who say they are online almost constantly fell from forty six percent to forty percent. It is moving the right way, and it is moving because kids are pulling back on their own.

Your kid probably already agrees with you

This is the finding that reframed the entire talk for me, and it is the reason I stopped treating this as a fight. Forty five percent of teenagers say social media hurts their sleep. Forty five percent say they spend too much time on it. Forty four percent have already tried to cut back on their own. Read that again, because it means almost half of them already feel exactly what you feel, and a large number of them have already tried to fix it and could not. They are not on the other side of this from you. They are stuck, and if we are honest, so are we.

Then there is the number that stung. Forty six percent of teenagers say their parent gets distracted by a phone while they are trying to talk to them. Almost half of our kids are telling researchers that we are the ones who cannot put it down. I do not have a clever answer to that. I just think we ought to sit with it for a minute before we go configure somebody else’s phone.

Stop counting hours and ask a better question

For years the standard advice was to count screen time, and I gave that advice myself. A study published in JAMA in June of 2025 mostly ended that for me. Researchers followed more than four thousand children from age nine to age fourteen, which is exactly the stretch where all of this begins. About one in three of those kids slid into what the researchers called an addictive pattern with social media, and those kids carried two to three times the risk of suicidal thoughts.

Here is the finding that matters most for you tonight. Total screen hours did not predict that risk. The pattern did. A kid who watches four hours of soccer highlights and then puts the phone down is in a completely different situation than a kid who spends ninety minutes on it but cannot stop, gets anxious when you take it, and reaches for it before he is fully awake. Same number on the clock, different child, different risk entirely. So stop counting hours and start asking whether he can put it down. That is a question you can answer by watching your own son for a week, and it will tell you more than any screen time report your phone will ever generate.

I want to be careful with one more number, the same way I was careful with it in the room. Data from the CDC covering 2021 through 2023 shows that teenagers getting four or more hours a day have roughly double the anxiety and close to triple the depression. That is a real and serious association. It is not proof that screens caused it, because kids who are already struggling also reach for phones. Both things can be true at once, and anybody telling you this science is fully settled is selling you something.

The risk most dads never see coming

If you have a son, read this section twice. Sextortion targets boys. That surprises nearly every parent I talk to, because most of us spend our worrying on our daughters. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received more than eighty thousand sextortion reports in 2025. Roughly a hundred and thirty seven a day of those involved somebody demanding money, which is up thirty seven percent in a single year. The age range hit hardest is fourteen to seventeen and it is overwhelmingly boys.

The way it works is fast and it is nearly always the same. An account that looks like a girl messages your son. She sends a photo first. He sends one back. Within minutes the message arrives saying pay me or I send this to everyone in your contacts. It can go from hello to threat in about five minutes. It usually begins on Snapchat, then Instagram, then Messenger, then Discord.

Now the number that no setting on this earth can fix. Only twenty three percent of the kids this happened to told a parent. Every one of the others carried it completely alone, at fourteen years old, at two in the morning, convinced their life was over. That is why the most important thing in my entire presentation was not a setting. It was a sentence, and I asked all twenty of those dads to say it to their kid word for word that same night.

If something happens on that phone and you are scared, come to me. You will not lose the phone. You will not be in trouble. I will handle it with you.

The promise about the phone has to be in there, because losing the phone is the exact thing your son is afraid of and that fear is what keeps him silent. If the price of telling you is losing his entire social world, he will take his chances alone and hope it goes away. Take that price off the table now, before anything happens, not after.

What actually works

I walked the room through every menu on both iPhone and Android, and all of it is in the handout. But if I could keep only five things from that morning, these are the five. Set the controls up together and out loud, with your kid watching you do it, because a control he watched you turn on is a rule he understands while a control he discovers on his own is a challenge he will try to beat. Loosen the rules as he earns it and tell him plainly what earning it looks like, because a setting that never changes is a setting he will eventually go around. Tell him you are going to check the phone and then actually check it, since surprise inspections do not build trust, they build hiding skills. Put controls on the game console, which only thirty five percent of parents ever do and which is a documented place where this kind of contact starts. And put your own phone down first, because eighty four percent of moms say they are comfortable talking with their kid about mental health while only seventy five percent of dads say the same, and closing that gap is our job and nobody else’s.

There is one more check that takes ten seconds and is worth more than an hour of settings. Pick up your kid’s phone and hold your finger on the Instagram icon. The account switcher will list every account signed in on that phone, including the second one you have never seen. Do the same on Snapchat and on TikTok. A hidden second account defeats every parental tool ever built, because all of them watch one linked account and nothing else. While you have the phone in your hand, look for two calculator apps, because one of them is probably not a calculator.

The honest ending

You cannot watch the whole river. You can teach him to swim. Everything from the presentation is in one guide, in English and in Spanish, so you can sit down tonight and actually finish something. It has the iPhone setup, the Android setup, the traps in both, what each app will and will not show you, and the ways kids get around all of it.

Download the guide (PDF, English and Spanish)

If something is happening right now, you do not have to work it out alone. The CyberTipline is 1-800-843-5678 and you can report at report.cybertip.org. If images of your child are already out there, Take It Down at takeitdown.ncmec.org will work to get them removed, and it costs nothing.

Twenty dads is not a movement. I know that. But twenty dads who each go home and fix one phone, and then hand this to three other dads, is sixty or eighty houses in this Valley where a kid knows he can come to his father when something goes wrong on that screen. That is worth a Saturday.

Pick one thing out of all this and finish it this week. Not all of it. One thing. Then say the sentence to your kid tonight, because that one is free, it takes ten seconds, and it matters more than every setting in this article combined.