One click and your kid shared everything

Hey Friends!

We watched the Integrity crew from the Artemis II mission splash down off the coast of San Diego last week and… we don’t even know what to say. Four humans just travelled farther from Earth than any people in history. 248,655 miles away from everything we know. From the school pickup line and the permission slips and the group chat drama and all of it. And then they came home safe!!

There's something about watching a moment like that that cracks you open a little. We're all just here, on this spinning rock, together. Whatever is heavy right now (and as parents, we know there's always something) it got a little quieter for a minute. We talked about it on the podcast this week because it stuck with us. Listen here.

It also made us think about our kids, and the world they're growing up in. Those astronauts looked back at Earth from 248,000 miles away and saw one small, glowing thing. No borders and no algorithm. Just home. We want our kids to carry that kind of perspective, which is exactly why the digital world they're navigating every day matters so much to us. Here's what you need to know this week.

The new law that would change how your kid sets up a new device

A new piece of bipartisan legislation called the Parents Decide Act was introduced in the US on April 2nd, and if it passes, it would fundamentally change the moment a child gets a new device. Right now, the second a phone is activated, everything is accessible (social platforms, AI chatbots, app stores, all of it) unless a parent manually hunts down every setting on every individual platform, one by one. And that can be overwhelming.

The Parents Decide Act would require Apple and Google to verify a new user's age at device setup and let parents lock in content controls right then, before the phone is even fully active. Those settings would then flow automatically to every app on the device. If this goes through, parents will be playing a lot less digital whack-a-mole when it comes to locking down a device.

It's a US bill and it hasn't passed yet, but it's a strong signal of where things are heading for all nations and more importantly, it's a reminder that you don't have to wait for a law to do this. The controls exist right now, on your child's current device. If you haven't set them up yet, or you're not sure if you've hit the ones that actually matter, the Screen Sense Guide walks you through exactly which settings to turn on for both iPhone and Android.

Three quarters of parents fear their kids don't know how to stay safe online

New research found that three in four parents are worried their child can't make safe choices about their online privacy. And yet 21% of parents have never had that conversation with their child. Another 38% talk about it less than once a month.

The stat that really got us was that 35% of parents believe their child would share personal information in exchange for game tokens or rewards. And its not because they’re actively trying to be reckless, it’s because no one has explained the risks to them yet.

Kids are tapping "accept" on apps, games, and websites without any real understanding of what they're agreeing to. A single click can reveal their name, their interests, their location, their sleep patterns, their browsing habits and in some cases that information ends up in the hands of people who mean them harm. We teach our kids about stranger danger in real life. We make them look both ways before they cross the street. This is the same conversation. It just happens on a screen.

Here’s what you can do today: 
Start small. It doesn’t have to be a formal sit-down. Just ask your child in the car what they do when an app asks for their information. Tell them that most free apps are paid for with data instead of dollars. Let them know they can always come to you before tapping accept on anything they're not sure about. One question in the car is enough to open a door.

We got away this week. For a little leisure and a little work, and it was fantastic. But we want to be honest about something because it’s important to highlight. This was only possible because of the systems we have at home. The people, the routines, the plans for who handles what and when. None of that happened overnight. It took time, and a lot of trial and error, and more than a few moments of "okay, that did not work, let's try again." Plus, the season of having older kids versus the younger ones. If going away is something that's available to you right now (even two nights, even one!) we could not recommend it enough.

And if it's not, if that's just not an option for you right now, please know that taking care of yourself doesn't have to look like a trip somewhere. It can be a coffee that stays hot. A walk without your phone. Twenty minutes of something that is just yours. You matter in this equation too. Don't forget that.

—Cat & Nat