Situation guides
Life throws situations at families that generic advice doesn’t cover. These are for those.
Situation guides
Divorce & shared custody: tech agreements
Practical guidance for coordinating device rules across two homes.
Open guide → SITUATIONFirst-gen phone migration
Upgrading from kid-watch or iPad mini to a “real” phone.
Open guide → SITUATIONGrandparent tech gifts: the checklist
Well-meaning grandparents buy gifts that can land unsecured. Here’s the conversation and the checklist.
Open guide → SITUATIONSummer camp & sleepaway device prep
What to configure before camp, during, and when your kid comes back.
Open guide → SITUATIONTravel & international roaming
What to configure before the trip, during, and if a device is lost abroad.
Open guide → SITUATIONTurning 13: what changes on each account, and what does not
Thirteen is the birthday parents dread, but on most accounts it moves less control than you think.
Open guide →Why situational guides exist
These are the moments when a setup that was working stops working: a device crosses into a second household, over a border, or into a summer with no school-week routine holding it up.
The common thread is that parental controls are anchored to something — an account, a home network, or one parent’s phone — and each of these situations moves the anchor. Every one of them is easier to handle before the change than after it.
Find the anchor before you change any setting. If the controls live on the home router, they end at the front door and a phone on mobile data is already outside them. If they live in one parent’s account, they travel with the child but depend on that parent staying reachable. Knowing which of those you have tells you what a given situation will break.
The hardest ones are not technical. Shared custody and a second household need an agreement between adults more than they need a setting, and a control one parent installs without telling the other tends to come off within the week. Where a guide here reads as being about a conversation rather than a menu, that is deliberate.
When parental controls change
The settings involved here change from year to year. Roughly monthly we send new guides, changes to controls like these, and scams worth knowing about.
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