66. Keeping Kids Safer Online with Tech-Insider Ashley: Parental Controls, Hidden App Risks, and Tech Alternatives to Smartphones

How can parents set real boundaries around kids’ screen use when every app has different settings—and kids can get around them? In part two of this tech safety series, Dr. Elise Fallucco continues her conversation with tech trust-and-safety insider (and mom) Ashley, senior manager of global risk assessment at Twitch. They break down why parents need to set parental controls inside each individual app (not just on the device), what to watch for in hidden or unexpected features like messaging and photo uploads (even in seemingly harmless games), and how kids may disguise apps to bypass rules. Ashley also shares practical tips like avoiding identifying details in usernames and profile photos, plus creative alternatives to a smartphone.

 They also discuss safer ways for kids to listen to music, including risks on platforms like Spotify and a workaround

 Finally, Ashley answers the question, “WHEN IS THE RIGHT time to introduce social media?” She talks about how to weigh factors like child maturity, family values, platform differences, ads, and risks like influencer content and mental health impacts—

00:00 Introduction

01:20 Setting Parental Controls and App Monitoring

02:29 Set Parental controls for EACH app!?

03:20 Monitoring Parental Controls

03:32 Apps in Disguise

04:45 Color By Number Surprises

06:13 Messaging and Grooming Risks

06:49 Practical Tips for Securing Tech Use for Kids

07:36 Username and Profile Picture Safety

09:21 Smartphones: Balancing risks and benefits

13:06 Music Players without graphic content

15:35 Social Media: When is it safe for kids to use?

17:59 Ashley's approach to thinking about Social Media

Listen to Part ONE of this Tech Series

65. Digital Dangers: Tips from a Tech Insider

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2182143/episodes/18649898

About Ashley: She is Senior Manager of Global Risk Assessment for Twitch, the world’s leading live-streaming platform.

Check out our website PsychEd4Peds.com for more resources!
Follow us on Instagram @psyched4peds

Transcript

Dr. Elise Fallucco 0:00

Welcome back to Child Mental Health for pediatric clinicians helping you, health Kids. I'm your host, Dr. Elise Fallucco, child psychiatrist, and mom, so. Today's episode is part two of a larger tech series about how parents can help keep their kids safe as they interact on tablets, on screens, on cell phones, on social media, et cetera. And we're continuing our conversation with Tech Insider and Mom Ashley. Who works in the trust and safety field in tech and serves as senior manager of global risk assessment for Twitch. And if you haven't listened to part one of the series, which is episode 65 and linked in our show notes, definitely go back and take a listen to that. But today she's gonna tell us what are the things that all parents need to do to protect kids, keep them safe, and set boundaries around online use. And most importantly, she's gonna answer some questions from our listeners that you sent in after listening to last week's episode, including some million dollar questions. When is the right time, to allow kids to get a smartphone? And when is the best time? To allow them access to social media. Without further ado, let's return to our conversation with Ashley. but Ashley, what other practical advice do you have to help parents create safe boundaries around their child's tech use?

Ashley 1:20

Parental controls are a very important thing you should be doing when monitoring your technology use, both for you and your kids. There are parental controls, of course, on your device that can set things like a limit to your screen time or to turn off your location. But then you also wanna go into each app to set the various controls. These are things that are going to limit, for example, who your child can talk to in a messaging app, or, can they upload pictures or videos, things like that. Is their profile public or private? This is something that you are gonna wanna do across all of the different apps because each one has different parental controls. And I think this is where parents. Find themselves losing control over their kids' use of technology because, A, they don't realize that parental controls are out there. B, if they do know that they're out there. They don't realize that they're different for each individual app, which leads me to C, which is it's super time consuming to have to then go into every single app and set those parental controls.

Dr. Elise Fallucco 2:29

This sounds like another job that we have to do, and frankly, I'm not very excited about it. I thought that just setting screen time limits for various apps and to make sure that my kids weren't using their iPad or their phone during certain hours of the day, that that was a great start, but it really sounds like I need to figure out all the different apps that my kids are regularly using and go into them individually. To make sure their profiles are private and to check whether they have the ability to message back and forth or upload things. Ashley, before you said this, this is honestly not something that has occurred to me and I think there've gotta be a lot of other parents out there. Feeling like this is a potential blind spot.

Ashley 3:11

Yeah, And not to mention, once you set the parental controls, kids are sneaky and they're smart, and they know how to go around the parental controls. So then not only do you have to set them, you have to continuously monitor them to ensure that they're still set and the kids aren't going around them. And there's crazy ways in which to do this. There are actual apps out there that kids can download and. It hides other apps. So what I mean by that is a kid may have Instagram downloaded onto their phone and you may have told your child, you are not allowed to use Instagram, and you may have, taken it off of their phone. The kid can re-download it and then through this other third party app, they can design an app that essentially overlays onto Instagram to make it look different. So if you were to look at the phone, it would look like, a card playing app. And so the parent can be like, of course you can play solitaire. You don't know until you click on it that Oh, it actually opens up into Instagram.

Dr. Elise Fallucco 4:14

There's an analogous version of this for our younger kids. Our youngest, who just turned 11 was playing they're basically Video games online, except the names of them were like, geometry fun or math facts. And at one point I figured out the geometry fun has nothing to do with geometry and math facts is essentially just a race car game. This makes me wonder, are there any other hidden apps or things that parents need to be aware of in seemingly harmless games or apps?

Ashley 4:46

Yes, another example from my own personal experience is. I had an app on my phone that was color by number. My kids like to click on the various parts of the picture, Hey, number two is gonna be blue. Okay, great. I thought to myself, of course, this is a kids' app. No problem. It wasn't until after I went to a trust and safety industry conference that I rethought this app, and I actually clicked into it and explored it a little bit more. Turns out that you can upload pictures into this app, and the app turns your personal picture into a color by number. Template. Which on the surface feels harmless, but yet, I started panicking. what did my kids upload? Turns out my daughter had uploaded a picture, but thankfully it was just a picture of our dog. But I went further and searched to see what pictures would come up. And so I searched something as simple as kissing, and sure enough, people had uploaded pictures of people kissing and turned them into a template. But they became public, right? They weren't private, and so they were accessible to anyone by anyone such as a 9-year-old kid. And so I only went so far as to search, kissing. But I think, you know where I'm going with this, people could have taken a picture of anything and uploaded it unless that particular game has rules or features to stop that content. also in the same app, there was messaging and I had no idea that was a feature in this particular Color by Number game. So this meant that people could befriend my daughter and they can start chatting. And again, that's where you see people start the grooming process. needless to say, I deleted this from my phone, but all of this is to educate you that. Every app is different and sometimes they have these other in-app usages that you don't expect or that you don't know about because, you don't know what to look for. So I think when you're looking at the apps that your kids are using or wanna download, those are some of the biggest things you want to make sure you have a good understanding of. Can they message people? Can they upload pictures? And the privacy settings to determine whether or not content on them is public versus private. Not only from what your kid might be uploading or trying to do, but also what they would be able to see from other people.

Dr. Elise Fallucco 7:16

That's incredibly practical advice. As parents, we have a good idea, certainly for our littler kids, which apps that they're using, but it sounds like we need to go into each individual app and set them to the appropriate private settings, and make sure that there's not the ability to message back and forth, or upload any content.

Ashley 7:35

Yes. And while you were talking about that, I also thought of two other tips, one of which is take a look at your kids' screen names,

7:43

their usernames across different

Ashley 7:45

apps. A lot of kids think, Hey, my name is Ashley. I'm going to call my, first name, last name, here's my address, here's my birthday. And so you wanna make sure that they're not giving away personal information, but I really take it one step further to show no indications that the person is a female, or a boy- it goes both ways. I don't want them to have that birthday in there because it indicates their age, right? And again, you might think oh, birth year is not that big of a deal or whatever. But again, it is, when it comes, to talking about these bad people who are specifically looking for young kids, right? Those are all signs. And similarly, take a look at your profile pictures. A lot of apps now have profile pictures to go along with everything. Games like the one I just mentioned with the color by number that had a picture associated with the username. you don't wanna picture of your kid. In those apps. Especially if they are viewable by other people. So they should really be, again, a benign picture. Like I'll usually upload a picture of a flower or something like that, nothing to give any kind of indication as to where you live, the schools you go to, anything like that.

Dr. Elise Fallucco 8:56

So to recap, some of the things parents can do to try to limit risk and keep kids safe are to set parental controls for each app. No identifying information with screen names and make sure that they're not uploading any pictures of themselves. Or their family for profile picks. And now here comes the million dollar question that everyone wants to know. Ashley as a tech industry insider and a mom. When are you going to let your kids have a smartphone? And practically speaking until your kids get smartphones, how can you make sure that they can stay socially connected with their friends, that they don't feel like they're missing out on too much, and that you can still be able to communicate with them for safety reasons? Stay tuned as Ashley answers these questions after the break. As a friend and colleague of Child Mental Health for pediatric clinicians, we know that you are busy taking care of kids and families, including your own family, but do you ever feel like there isn't enough time to take care of yourself? If so, we wanted to share a new I. Wellbeing hack. A small step you can take to reset your own nervous system so you can feel better. You can practice this while you're shuttling between patient rooms or even on your commute. And it will not take a lot of time. Here it goes. Four six breathing. Inhale for four and exhale for six. Let's do it together. Inhale for 4, 3, 2, 1, and exhale for 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and repeat. Simple as that. Do a few rounds of four, six breathing when you need a rest, when you open a new patient's chart, or even when you glance at your phone to check for your latest text or email. I hope this is helpful and please know that we at Child Mental Health for pediatric clinicians care about your wellbeing. And now back to the episode.

Ashley 11:03

So I know from my family we're gonna wait on the cell phones until at least eighth grade. Hopefully longer. But, we did just buy one of those new phones for our kids, that are out there. It's an actual landline, but instead of having to plug it in, you can set it up to wifi. It's called a tin can phone. I do not get paid to say this, but it's really neat because if a friend has a tin can phone, you can call each other for free. If your friend does not have a tin can phone, then you do have to have a subscription plan, but I think it's $10 a month. And then they just get to call their friends. So it's literally like an old school handheld phone. And so we're trying that route, for now.

Dr. Elise Fallucco 11:47

so it sounds like the TIN Can is a really great tech alternative or solution that allows your daughter to stay socially connected with her friends without having access to a smartphone. This definitely helps her for communication while she's at home, but it doesn't really address the problem of how can we stay connected with our kids when they're not at home. we were really struggling about when to give Our oldest, a phone. Our main concern was we wanted, to be able to have him contact us when football practice gets rained out, when he's in a field in the middle of nowhere and they decide to end early or they've just canceled it all together, we were so afraid that he would be stuck without a way to get ahold of us. And so frankly, we caved and gave him a smartphone at that point. But it was, but honestly, we were just not familiar with any sort of smartphone tech alternatives at the time. But now knowing what we know, we're planning to wait to give our youngest a smartphone, which he's not happy about, and instead we've been using a smart watch to communicate with him when we need, which has actually worked. Okay. So I really like the idea of sharing information about smartphone alternatives and recommendations with parents.

Ashley 12:55

Yes, smartphone alternative. And I think that's a good point too, is like in trying to balance what is appropriate for kids, there are so many products out there that do take these things into effect. My daughter is really into music right now and there's no good streaming service for her at this age. And by that I mean there are some out there that are meant for kids. There is Spotify kids, there is Amazon kids, but all of those have certain settings. That prevent her from accessing the music that she likes nowadays, right? It's Hey, here's Disney Princess Music or Sesame Street Music, and that's not really what she's into as a preteen. And so then you get stuck looking at just regular Spotify, and that clearly has content on there that you wouldn't want a child to look at. So the album covers and then also, they will have, videos on Spotify, and so there is content you don't want them to watch. Something I recently learned is that there's porn on Spotify. And you would say to yourself, what? I thought it was just the music. Yes, but guess what? There are podcasts on Spotify and there are podcasts that have porn, like material or audio sounds that can get by. It may not be visual porn, but it's auditory porn. And so it leaves me stuck with how do I let my child listen to music and there's no perfect solution out there. And trust me, I've researched the different services and like, how can I get at what my daughter wants? And so we've had to do the best we can with what we have. So we do let her use Spotify, but we have a specific. Streaming playlist for her, she can add songs to it, but we go on there and make sure that there aren't inappropriate songs. So we have to be, vigilant constantly monitor that. So we recently bought a product for, her, it's called The Mighty, and it's like an old school. IPod Nano maybe. So it's literally just the buttons to play, fast forward, go back and you just download your playlist. And so we have downloaded her playlist from Spotify that we have oversight of, and she can go about her day listening to it. we are able to download it where she's not looking at the cover or a video or anything else like that. that's how we have solved that problem. it just requires a lot of unique, thinking or a lot of research to find which solution works for you and your family.

Dr. Elise Fallucco 15:35

Okay, so you've talked about a smartphone alternative and then a different way, like a tech alternative that kids can listen to music without having a smartphone. But now here's the other really tough question for you. What is the right age to allow kids access to social media?

Ashley 15:54

It is really hard to answer the question of when is the right time to give your kids access to social media? And this is because it really depends on the kid and their interests and their maturity as well as the family and their values and it also depends on the type of social media or app that you're considering. There are some social media apps where you can just look at pictures or you can also do media and. You know, maybe Pinterest comes across as being a little bit, safer for kids because you're looking at crafts or, things that you wanna make, whereas, something like Facebook or Instagram has a lot more access to social media influencers, the news, which can be quite graphic and other types of content that you might not want a child to see. And then you also have to think about. Ads. Because nowadays ads can talk about a lot of different topics, that you again may not want your child to see. And so again, it's really up to you and thinking about what's best for your family and also even thinking about the, the gender and the age of your kids, right? Because we know a lot of boys tend to go to gaming platforms and girls tend to go to a lot of,, the platforms where there's more of the ability to chat with their friends and have that social aspect and also to see where there's a lot of that. Social influencing happening. You know, they may wanna look at beauty content and stuff like that. And you also have to consider that because there are a lot of different things that come out of those types of apps. And you know, with the social media, girls are gonna be more susceptible to, mental health issues on that if they see things on beauty standards or, eating disorders or things like that. So, there again, there's no right answer. You just have to take in a lot of those different factors.

Dr. Elise Fallucco 17:59

Man, that's a great answer. But I have to admit that I was secretly hoping that you'd have a magical age that would work for every kid, and it would just make it simple, but, but you're right. It is really complex. And then we need to kind of think about what type of social media are we talking about? And of course, to keep in mind. The maturity and individual characteristics of each kid. So it sounds like all social media is not created equally and that things parents have to consider are, are the kids having access to influencers whether a given social media platform has ads and what kind of things that they're gonna be advertising to the kids, which brings up a huge point, which is that parents play a huge role. In helping their children develop digital literacy and to be able to sort through not only what is real and what is not real, but what types of content that they should try to steer away from or be aware of. And this brings me to the topic of part three in our tech series, which we're gonna cover next episode, which is how to talk to kids about these risks and how to navigate them, how to have these conversations in a way that's age appropriate. And in a way that ultimately builds trust between parents and children but also. In a way that allows kids to keep their eyes open and be aware of potential risks and to know what to do when that happens. Thanks for listening. And as always, if you like this episode, please share it with a friend and click the plus Follow button so you won't miss any future episodes of Child Mental Health for pediatric clinicians. See you next time.