January 2, 2026

A few days ago, I found that a grown man had been texting my twelve-year-old son on his "kid-safe" Gabb phone. The man got my son's number through a children's book chat on an app called GroupMe. Thankfully my wife and I discovered the situation and intervened before anything bad happened; but still it was sickening to discover that on Christmas morning, while our family was unwrapping presents next to the tree, some creep had been texting my son: "What did you get? Send pictures."

How could we have let this happen? How could we be such careless parents?

But wait . . . hadn't we done what we were supposed to do? We bought the "kid-safe" phone. And we confirmed GroupMe was on the Gabb "approved apps" list, which, as I understand it, offers "no social media or high-risk options." We did the safe things, right?

Maybe not. Turns out Gabb's own blog appears to include GroupMe on a list of seven apps with dangerous chat features, describing it as an app that "opens the door to potential dangers." We were apparently supposed to find that warning ourselves, somewhere among Gabb's 572 blog posts:

$ curl -s \
  https://gabb.com/post-sitemap.xml \
  | grep -oE 'https://gabb\.com/blog/[^<]+' \
  | sort -u \
  | wc -l \
  | xargs -I{} echo "{} blog posts as of $(date '+%B %d, %Y')"

572 blog posts as of January 02, 2026

But if GroupMe "opens the door" to danger, why did Gabb put it on their "approved apps" list? When I revisited the site, I noticed a small message beneath GroupMe mentioning Communication with Strangers. I hovered over it with my mouse pointer, and a tooltip appeared: "Allows contact and communication with people the child may not know."

So it allows communication with strangers, but it's not "high-risk?" The approved list isn't looking so safe. The approved list is apparently a catalog of risks I'm supposed to decipher by filtering through 838 apps and hovering my mouse pointer around to see tooltips:

$ for cat in \
  existing_apps \
  unapproved_apps \
  unmet_criteria_apps \
  music_apps; do
  count=$(curl -s "https://gabb.com/app-guide/" \
    | grep -o "${cat} = \[.*\]" \
    | head -1 \
    | sed "s/${cat} = \[//" \
    | sed "s/\]//" \
    | tr ',' '\n' \
    | sed "s/'//g" \
    | sed 's/^ *//' \
    | sort -u \
    | wc -l \
    | tr -d ' ')
  echo "$count $cat"
done && echo "...as of $(date '+%B %d, %Y')"

586 existing_apps
60 unapproved_apps
170 unmet_criteria_apps
22 music_apps
...as of January 02, 2026

Whatever the reason for this complexity, I don't feel in control.

And Gabb isn't alone in making me feel like this. It seems like many companies selling tech to families operate in the same way: market safety, deliver complexity, and leave parents to figure it out.

Take the Nintendo Switch my son unwrapped between those creepy texts. To set it up, I had to:

1. Connect the console to the internet
2. Download the Nintendo Switch Parental Controls app to my phone
3. Create a Nintendo Account for myself
4. Link my credit card and be charged $0.50 to verify parental consent
5. Set up parental controls from the app on my phone
6. Sync the parental controls app to the Nintendo Switch
7. Set up a security PIN on the Nintendo Switch
8. Create a Nintendo Account for my son
9. Sync my son's Nintendo Account to the Nintendo Switch
10. Discover that half the controls live in the phone app and the other half live on Nintendo's website, because of course they do
11. Log into Nintendo's website to finish the job . . .

Only to discover that there's no clear option to block internet access, no clear way to disable downloads from the Nintendo eShop, and no easy way to make this thing function like an old-school Game Boy and just let a kid have fun with a game cartridge. But that's just nostalgia talking. Nobody wants that anymore. Apparently.

Because next comes Minecraft. Ah, Minecraft. The game every middle-schooler on earth apparently needs to survive. To let my son play with his friends:

12. Create a Microsoft account for myself
13. Create an email address for my son
14. Create a Microsoft account for my son
15. Set up a gamertag for my son on account.xbox.com
16. Configure parental controls in Microsoft Family Safety
17. Configure more parental controls on xbox.com

Now, I did my best to configure these settings. I really did. But xbox.com alone includes twenty-nine confusingly overlapping settings related to chat, friends, and communication. Twenty-nine.

And when I finally—finally—tried to test online play, Minecraft told me I would need to loosen the parental controls (it did not say which) and create a Nintendo Switch Online account for my son.

Nintendo Switch Online (not really another account, mind you, but a membership) involves a recurring fee. It also unlocks access to the Nintendo eShop, which I cannot disable. I can set his eShop spending limit to zero, sure. But I can't block free downloads. So to let my son play online Minecraft with his friends, I have to open him up to an unrelated store full of content I can't possibly evaluate. That's the deal. Take it or leave it.

I assume some marketing person at Nintendo, probably sitting in a conference room in Kyoto, surrounded by whiteboards covered in arrows and cartoon stick figures, has this entire process mapped out as a "customer journey." And by Step 17, the journey is supposed to be over. You're supposed to be so beaten down, so utterly depleted of will, that you just cave. You sign up for Nintendo Online. You disable a bunch of parental controls you don't really understand. You let your kid play his damn game. You become the ideal customer.

But I didn't cave. Instead, somewhere on the threshold of Customer Journey Step 18, I found myself gripping the Switch with both hands and imagining, quite vividly, what it would feel like to lift the Switch up, and bring it down over my knee. I could almost hear the crack. Could almost see that OLED display splintering into a thousand pieces. The little Joy-Cons skittering across the floor. My son's face. My wife's face. The stunned silence.

I did not break the Switch.

What I did was announce, in a voice louder than necessary, that nobody was to ask me about anything Minecraft-related on the Nintendo Switch for a minimum of two weeks. My son could play Zelda: Breath of the Wild instead, which, thank you, developers, thank you from the bottom of my heart, doesn't appear to involve any mandatory online anything whatsoever.

Here's what I want: an off switch. A single setting that says "this child cannot go online, communicate with strangers, spend money, or download anything without my explicit permission." Instead I get a maze, complex enough that when something goes wrong, I'm at fault for a tooltip I didn't hover over, a blog post I didn't read, a submenu I didn't find. Maybe that's by design. Maybe it's neglect. I don't know.

What I know is this. My son just wants to play video games and talk to his friends. I just want to keep him safe. Somewhere between those two things, I'm supposed to become an expert in the convoluted parental control schemes of Gabb, Nintendo, Microsoft, and Xbox, while a stranger's Christmas morning texts sit in my son's phone history.

Parental controls shouldn't be this hard.

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