Sixteen and Over

At sixteen most young people are two years from managing every aspect of their own lives. The arrangement should already look like that.

What is left

Very little, technically, and that is correct.

Purchase arrangements, which are a money conversation rather than a safety one.

Sleep, which remains worth holding and is increasingly theirs to manage.

And the household's own norms: phones at meals, or not, applied to everybody including adults.

What should have gone

Content filtering, which at this age blocks health information, sex education and support resources while blocking nothing they cannot reach elsewhere.

Activity reporting, entirely.

App restrictions.

And location tracking as a default state, which is covered in its own note and is the one most often kept past its usefulness.

Why keeping controls here backfires

A sixteen-year-old under a twelve-year-old's arrangement concludes that the parent has not noticed they have grown up.

Which is a relationship problem rather than a technology one, and it generalises.

And it produces the exact concealment that makes the remaining years harder, at the age when the things worth telling a parent are the most serious.

What replaces it

Being the person they tell.

Which is built by not overreacting, by treating their judgement as real, and by having talked about the difficult subjects before they arrive.

The specific conversations — money, pornography, images, pressure, mental health — are the work now, and several have their own notes.

Money and independence

A bank account, a card, and their own purchases.

Which is the practical version of handing over control and is an easier conversation than most of this.

Subscriptions in their own name rather than on the family account, which is a small step and makes the ownership explicit.

The things worth still saying

That anything sent can be kept and shared, including by somebody they trust now.

That an account they no longer use is still an account, and closing it is worth doing.

That a request for money, or for images, from anybody, is a thing to tell somebody about immediately and without shame.

And that none of these carries a penalty at home, which has to have been true for years to be believed now.

Preparing for no controls at all

At eighteen, nothing here applies.

Which means the last two years are the rehearsal, and a young person who has managed their own settings, their own spending and their own limits for a while is in a different position from one who has them removed on a birthday.

Hand things over before they are taken, which is the whole argument of the age section compressed into one line.

What to check

Is anything still switched on that was set when they were thirteen?

Do they manage their own account settings, or do you?

Have the difficult conversations happened, or are they still pending?

And would they call you at two in the morning from a situation they should not be in — which is the only measure of any of this that ultimately matters.

What this changes

Handing over settings in the last two years of school means the young person has managed their own arrangements before nobody is managing them at all, which is the actual objective..

The check

Find out who holds the account password.

The answer describes where you actually are in the handover, whatever the plan says.

The conversations that remain

Money, images, pressure, and mental health.

None of them is technical, all of them matter more than any setting now, and several have their own notes. This is the work at this age and the settings are essentially finished.

Worth knowing

Subscriptions and purchases moving into their own name is the practical version of handing over control, and it is an easier conversation than most of the rest of this.

One more thing

Anything sent can be kept and shared, including by somebody they trust now. That sentence is worth saying at this age even though it sounds obvious, because it is the one people wish they had heard.