Sarah Kimmel highlights common mistakes parents make with tech rules, from neglecting controls to making unkept promises, emphasising the importance of regular review and realistic commitments to foster healthier digital habits.
Sarah Kimmel says the most awkward part of parenting with technology is not the obscure security setting or the latest app your child wants to download. It is the ordinary stuff: the controls you meant to restore, the rules you never quite wrote down, the history you stopped checking and the consequence you announced but never carried out. In an essay for Family Tech, Kimmel, who describes herself as a family technology expert with more than 20 years in IT, argues that most digital parenting mistakes fall into three patterns: knowing what to do but not doing it, choosing the easier path when you are tired and making commitments that are hard to reverse.
One of her biggest lapses, she writes, came after she loosened parental controls for a family trip and never reset them once home. The episode is a reminder that these tools are only useful if families actually revisit them. The eSafety Commissioner in Australia says family technology agreements and related rules should be flexible and age-appropriate, while parental controls are intended to cover issues such as screen time, content limits, spending and online safety. McAfee likewise notes that controls can help across phones, tablets, laptops and games consoles, but only if parents keep them current. Kimmel’s point is simple: temporary changes should have an end date.
She is equally blunt about a family tech agreement she recommends to others but has not consistently used in her own home. That, too, reflects a wider problem many parents face. The eSafety Commissioner and other family-tech organisations say a written agreement helps set device rules, online behaviour and digital boundaries in a way everyone can revisit. Without that shared document, Kimmel says, every argument turns into a memory test about what was said, what was meant and what was actually understood.
Her second category is exhaustion, and it covers the habits that slip when the day has already drained you. Kimmel says she knows how to review browsing history on phones and parental-control dashboards, yet does not do it with the consistency she ought to. She also admits she sometimes allows devices at family gatherings because it feels easier than managing boredom and restlessness. That trade-off may buy a quieter evening, but it can also mean children are physically present while mentally somewhere else.
The final category is the commitment trap, and it is where Kimmel thinks parents do the most damage. She says she once promised her son Discord at 13, then kept the promise even after deciding the timing was probably wrong. Discord’s age limit provided a convenient excuse, but not necessarily the best judgement, she writes. The problem was not the platform itself, but the fact that she had turned a date on the calendar into a promise she no longer wanted to honour. She says a better approach is to schedule a review rather than a guarantee.
Kimmel says the same logic applies to punishments. She once threatened to take away all technology when school grades slipped, then failed to follow through because the consequence was too broad and disruptive. That gap, she argues, is exactly where children learn whether a rule is real. Her advice is to match the consequence to the behaviour: remove the app, limit the laptop or narrow phone access rather than cutting off every digital tool at once. Pew Research has found that many parents already use parental controls or similar methods to monitor children’s online activity, but Kimmel’s message is that the value of any rule depends on whether it can actually be enforced.
Her broader argument is less about guilt than maintenance. She says parents should review settings regularly, choose a small number of rules they can protect even on tired days and avoid making promises or threats they are not prepared to keep. Kimmel also says she does not believe in New Year’s resolutions, preferring shorter resets that make it easier to recover from a bad day. That, she suggests, is the mindset families need online too: not perfection, but a willingness to adjust, own mistakes and start again.
Disclaimer: This content is for informational purposes only and is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical judgment, advice, diagnosis, or treatment.
