Before You Hand Them the Phone

Your twelve-year-old has been quiet for three days. This morning they asked to delete their account, and they will not say why.

Every parent gets handed this job with no manual. What arrives instead is advice that manages to be both terrifying and useless: predators everywhere, screens are ruining them, just talk to your kids. None of it tells you which button to press on a Tuesday night.

This book presses the buttons. Every parental control worth turning on, on the devices your child actually uses, with the steps written out. Then it deals with the handful of situations that genuinely do serious damage, and exactly what to do in the first hour of each one.

It also says the part most books skip. Controls are the seatbelt. What actually protects a child is whether they will tell you when something goes wrong, and every serious case gets worse in the gap between the child knowing and the adult knowing. There is a chapter on closing that gap, and it is the most important one in the book.

What is inside

• Every control, with steps: iPhone, iPad, Android, Fire tablet, Windows, Switch, PlayStation and Xbox, including the communication setting that is nearly always left open
• The games, explained properly: what Roblox, Minecraft, Fortnite and Discord actually are, where the money goes, and where strangers get in
• The conversation that has to happen first: why children stay silent, and the four-minute talk that changes it
• Financial sextortion: the crime aimed squarely at teenage boys that most parents have never heard of, how fast it moves, and what to do in the first hour
• Images that are not real: fake nudes made from ordinary photos, cloned voices, AI companions, and the family code word that defeats a whole category
• When other kids are the problem: documenting it, involving the school, and the line where it becomes a police matter
• Screen time without a war: the four things actually worth defending, and why the fight always happens at the wrong moment
• The school device: what the district monitors, what you are liable for, and the questions to ask in writing
• The first 24 hours: an emergency chapter written to be readable at eleven at night by somebody whose hands are shaking

The details

• 17 chapters, around 13,600 words, 72 pages
• A checklist at the end of every chapter
• PDF and EPUB, both included: the EPUB reflows to your font size and works with read-aloud, so it can be listened to rather than read
• Written for the United States, with reporting services for elsewhere named where they exist
• Instant download. No account needed to buy. Nothing ships

It is not a panic. Most children have an ordinary time on the internet, the same way most children have an ordinary time at school. This is the short list of things that are actually worth your attention, and what to do about each one.