Safe AI for kids: what a parent should actually check

"Safe for kids" is a marketing phrase, not a specification. These are the six things worth checking, and what a good answer looks like for each.

Every AI product aimed at families describes itself as safe. The word is doing no work — it has no agreed definition and nobody audits the claim. What follows is what to check instead. None of it requires technical knowledge, and all of it can be done before you hand over an account.

1. Can you set the rules, or only accept theirs?

Most tools ship one safety policy written by the vendor. It will refuse the obvious. It will not know what your family does not discuss. Look for whether you can add your own topics — and then test one to see whether it actually took effect.

2. Do the rules apply everywhere, or just to chat?

Test the same subject in every tool the product offers: chat, images, video, story generation. Filters are usually built for text first and the other tools catch up later, or never. A child blocked in chat who can generate a picture of the same thing has found the gap without looking for it.

3. Does it work on your child's phone?

If the protection is an app setting or a browser extension, it protects that device. Sign in on a different phone and try something that should be refused. If it is allowed there, you have device protection, not account protection.

4. What happens when their safety system is down?

Worth asking support directly. If the safety check cannot run, does the product refuse to answer, or answer anyway? Both are choices a company makes deliberately. Only one of them is the right choice for a tool a child uses.

5. Can you see what happened without reading everything?

There is a real tension here. Reading every message a teenager sends is usually the wrong parenting decision and will end the child's honesty with you. Seeing nothing at all leaves you unable to notice a pattern that matters.

What you want is the middle: whether anything was blocked, roughly what kind of thing, and how often. Enough to start a conversation, not so much that you are reading a diary.

6. Are time limits real limits?

If a product offers screen-time controls, set one and then test it after it should have expired. Time limits are one of the most commonly advertised and least commonly enforced features in this category, because they are easy to display and fiddly to implement.

One thing worth more than all six

Sit with your child the first few times they use it. Not to supervise — to see what they ask, which is genuinely interesting, and to be the person they mention it to when something odd comes back. No filter substitutes for being the adult a child tells.

Navōn is built for families who want to set the rules themselves.

Common questions

Is ChatGPT safe for kids?

It applies a general safety policy that refuses obviously harmful content, but parents cannot add their own blocked topics, the rules cannot be extended to a specific family's standards, and there is no parental view of what was refused.

What age is right for a child to use AI?

There is no single answer, but the more useful question is whether the tool lets the responsible adult set the standard and see what happened. A tool a parent can configure and review is appropriate earlier than one they cannot.

Do parental controls on AI tools actually work?

Test them rather than trusting the description. Set a blocked topic and try it, set a time limit and test after it expires, and try the same request on a different device. Advertised controls are not always enforced ones.

Published by Navōn. How these guides are written and checked.