[donmcronald]

I share this opinion. The parental controls are so bad it almost seems intentional. Look at the mishmash of trash you need to deal with between a Microsoft account and an XBox account (which are sort of the same thing). That's with a company that IMO is trying to make it work, but the experience still sucks.

Then add in the need for a parent account (or two) plus a child account (or two or three) for every service / app kids want to use and all of a sudden you're asking people to manage dozens of accounts. Throw in multiple platforms and you could literally be trying to manage two or three dozen sets of parental controls and it's not static. The apps / services are constantly churning.

It's easy to criticize the OP of this article, but I know the feeling. The intent to be a good moderator is there, but the tooling isn't and after a while you just give up, turn a 10 year old into an 18 year old, and moderate over their shoulder instead.

The distinction between apps is huge too. Things like Minecraft, Roblox, educational games, etc. are pretty harmless and somewhat creative. Apps like TikTok and Facebook are worthless and should be banned (by parents) IMO.