What Kids and Parents Want: Policy Insights for Social Media Safety Features

This report examines the gap between child safety policy proposals for social media and how teens and parents — the people these policies are meant to protect — experience and view them. While the topic of child safety online is becoming increasingly prominent, with governments worldwide introducing proposals that aim to keep children safe online, many interventions remain largely untested and raise concerns about effectiveness, privacy, and unintended consequences. To address this disconnect, we conducted qualitative research with 45 parents and teens using a human-centered design approach to evaluate perceptions of four widely proposed intervention categories: age verification, screen-time features, algorithmic feed controls, and parental access.