There was a time when the internet lived in one place.
It sat in the corner of the house, as a shared computer in a shared room. The family computer wasn’t personal, portable, or invisible. It was communal. If you wanted to go online, you did so with the quiet awareness of family life unfolding around you: someone making tea, a sibling hovering nearby, the television on in the background.
That context mattered.
Online access came with friction. You waited your turn. You explained what you were doing. Parents didn’t need activity logs or alerts - rather, supervision happened naturally, through proximity rather than control.
Outside the computer, independence existed in parallel forms. You could walk to school with a Walkman and slowly develop your own music taste. You could skim the morning paper before anyone else noticed. An older age rating on a DVD marked something to be negotiated or discussed, rather than content you were permanently immersed in.
Culture arrived with packaging, labels, and limits. Boundaries were visible, and therefore negotiable.
Today, those boundaries are largely invisible. This has made parenting feel more anxious, more uncertain, and harder to navigate.
When screens became the enemy
Modern conversations about children and technology are often dominated by anxiety.
Phones are framed as addictive, corrosive, and dangerous. Advice swings between extremes: total restriction or total oversight. Screens themselves become the villain, rather than the context in which they’re used.
This kind of binary thinking increasingly runs counter to guidance from paediatric experts, who emphasise that context, content, and support matter more than blanket access or restriction.
At the same time, for children, online culture isn’t optional.
Group chats, games, memes, music, and shared references are how children fit in, learn the rules of social life, and begin to form identity. Parents know this, even as they worry about what unrestricted access might expose their children to.
So families live inside a tension:
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Children want online access in order to belong
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Parents want protection without cutting them off from the world
Both instincts are valid. The problem is that most tools for a child’s first smartphone force families to choose one extreme or the other.
From supervision to surveillance.
In previous generations, parental supervision didn’t require omniscience.
Parents didn’t read every book or listen to every song. They relied on age ratings, broadcast schedules, and shared spaces, filling in the gaps with conversation, trust, and judgement.
Many modern parental control tools unintentionally break this balance.
Some solutions, such as Qustodio, are genuinely useful for parents who want full, constant oversight of their child’s digital life. For some families, that level of monitoring offers reassurance.
But when we spoke to parents, many told us that solutions which felt like surveillance created new problems. Most parents don’t have the time or emotional capacity to analyse every interaction, making constant monitoring unrealistic. Over time, it could also harm trust, turning everyday digital life into something adversarial rather than collaborative.
Independent research suggests that excessive digital monitoring can reduce trust and encourage secrecy, rather than supporting healthier online behaviour.
There exist other approaches which focus on heavy restriction. However, this results in simplified devices that work well for a short stage of childhood, but struggle to adapt as children grow older.
What many parents described wanting instead was something more familiar: sympathetic supervision.
Family life isn’t a settings menu.
Real family life is not neat.
Children mature unevenly. Developmental research consistently shows that children reach social and emotional milestones at different rates, shaped as much by environment and support as by age alone.
One child may be ready for more independence at nine, another not until thirteen. Rules evolve. Trust grows, occasionally resets, and grows again. Childhood isn’t linear, so parenting can’t be either.
Yet many digital safety tools assume there is one correct configuration. One moment when a child is “ready.” One version of childhood to design for.
Parents told us this didn’t reflect reality.
What they wanted was flexibility:
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To adjust screen time boundaries without drama
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To change app access as circumstances change
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To increase independence gradually, not all at once
This flexibility used to exist naturally. Shared technology created shared understanding. The family computer didn’t need constant updates - it simply existed in context.
Smartphones removed that context entirely.
The world may be frightening but its also full of wonder.
It’s understandable that parents focus on what’s frightening about the internet.
Children can encounter adult content, cruelty, pressure, or ideas they’re not ready for. These risks are real, and ignoring them helps no one.
But focusing only on danger misses something equally true: the internet is also a place of discovery. Children learn skills, find creative communities, explore interests, and connect with ideas far beyond their immediate surroundings.
The challenge isn’t whether children should be online.
It’s how they get there - and whether parents can remain calmly involved.
This is why conversations about online safety for kids often stall. They frame the internet as either a threat to be locked away from, or a reality parents must surrender to.
Neither reflects how families actually work.
Listening first: building with parents, not for them.
When Other Phone was created, it didn’t start with a feature list. It started with listening.
Mumsnet is the UK’s largest parenting forum and one of the most trusted sources for real-world product reviews - making it an ideal partner for shaping a phone around genuine family needs.
Hundreds of parents were asked what actually mattered when choosing a phone for their child. The goal wasn’t to design another generic kids’ device, but to understand how families really live with technology.
Parents consistently told us they wanted:
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A phone that felt contemporary and well-designed, not disposable or embarrassing
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Controls that could adapt as their child grew
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Protection and reassurance without constant monitoring
This research-led approach shaped a phone built around what parents actually told us they wanted - a perspective later recognised by the wider media, including Sky News, Verge, LBC, and The Times.
Not a perfect solution, but one designed to live inside real family life.
A modern version of the family computer
Other Phone doesn’t attempt to eliminate the tension at the heart of modern parenting. It accepts it and sits in the middle.
Rather than treating a child’s phone as either fully private or fully surveilled, it works like a modern update to the family computer: a shared system with evolving boundaries.
Parents can manage parental controls remotely, without repeatedly taking the phone away. Content filters operate across apps, not just browsers. Screen time and schedules can be adjusted calmly, without turning every change into a confrontation.
Crucially, these controls aren’t fixed.
As children grow, the guardrails can change. Restrictions can ease. Independence can expand deliberately, rather than arriving suddenly. This mirrors how responsibility has always been handed down - gradually, visibly, and with trust.
Why one-size-fits-all doesn’t work
One of the clearest lessons from speaking to parents is that there is no universal “right” approach.
Some children need more structure for longer. Others thrive with early independence. Some families prioritise creativity and exploration; others need routine and predictability.
Tools that require parents to monitor everything can be emotionally exhausting. Tools that freeze children in an early stage of childhood can become frustrating or irrelevant.
What many parents want instead is confidence - knowing that if something genuinely inappropriate appears, they’ll be aware, without having to constantly look over their child’s shoulder.
That middle ground matters. It protects relationships as much as it protects children.
Living with the tension
There is no final solution to online parenting.
Technology will continue to evolve. Culture will shift. The tension between freedom and protection is permanent, and that’s okay.
The family computer worked not because it was perfect, but because it placed technology inside family life. It was visible, contextual, and shared. It allowed parents to supervise without spying, and children to explore withoutx being left alone.
Today’s equivalent doesn’t live on a desk. It lives in how we frame our children’s relationship with technology.
Modern childhood doesn’t need less access.
It needs better context.
And sometimes, the most future-facing ideas are simply thoughtful updates of things we once understood instinctively - when supervision was calm, boundaries were human, and growing up was something families navigated together.
