A/S/L?

If you were online in the late '90s or early 2000s, three letters probably still live somewhere in the back of your brain.

A/S/L?

Age, sex, location. It was the first thing anybody typed when you walked into an AOL chat room, and the answer was almost always a lie. Everybody was 23. Everybody lived somewhere cooler than where they actually lived. And a lot of those 23-year-olds were 16, sitting at the family computer in the living room, in a chat room they had no business being in at that age.

I know, because I grew up in those rooms. I was one of those kids.

The internet's original honor system

For anyone who missed it: AOL was how a huge part of the country got online. You'd hear the dial-up modem scream, wait for "Welcome! You've got mail," and then head to the chat rooms. They started out as a feature called People Connection, and a room only held 23 people. When one filled up, AOL just opened another.

There were rooms for everything. Hobbies, music, your state, your city, your age group. And that last one is the punchline, because there was nothing stopping anybody from walking into any room they wanted. The whole system ran on whatever you typed after A/S/L.

AOL did have parental controls. Parents could set an account to Kids Only, Young Teen or Mature Teen. But plenty of parents didn't know the settings were there, and plenty of kids knew their parents' screen name and password. So the controls mostly worked on the honor system too.

AOL shut its chat rooms down in 2010. AIM, the instant messenger that grew out of it, signed off for good in December 2017. The rooms are gone. The lesson isn't.

What we didn't think about back then

Here's the part that's funny when you're 16 and not funny at all when you're the adult in the house.

If we were lying about our age, so was everybody else. That works in both directions. The kid saying they were 23 had no idea who was on the other side of the screen either. Most of the time it was other bored teenagers. Not always. And none of us were thinking about that, because we were kids, and kids think they can spot a fake from a mile away.

The internet my generation grew up on was one family computer, one dial-up line and one parent yelling that they needed to use the phone. Today it's a phone in every pocket, a tablet in the car, a game console with voice chat, a laptop for school and a smart TV, all online all the time. Kids still lie about their age. They just do it on a sign-up screen now, and the "chat room" is a DM, a game lobby or a Discord server.

The good news is that parental controls have come a long way since Kids Only and Young Teen. They're built into almost everything now, they're free, and most of them are pretty good. The bad news is they're still off until somebody turns them on.

The one setting that matters most: the real birthday

Almost every modern protection depends on one thing: the account knowing how old your kid actually is.

Apple, Google, Instagram, YouTube and the game consoles all apply stricter defaults to younger users. Instagram, for example, puts teens in private accounts with limited messaging, and teens under 16 need a parent's permission to loosen those settings. Apple's newer software turns on web filtering and Communication Safety by default for teens 13 to 17.

None of that kicks in if the account says your 14-year-old was born in 1999. A/S/L is still the weak spot. It's just a birthday field now.

So step one, on every account: make sure the birthday is real, and set the account up under your family group instead of as a standalone account.

Where the controls live

Here's the quick map. You don't need all of these. You need the ones for the devices in your house.

• iPhone, iPad and Mac: set up Family Sharing, add your kid as a child account, then go to Screen Time. That's where you'll find Downtime, App Limits, Content & Privacy Restrictions, Communication Limits and Ask to Buy. Recent versions also let parents approve before a kid can text a new number.
• Android phones and Chromebooks: use Google's Family Link app. It covers screen time, app approvals, content filters, School time and location.
• Windows PCs and Xbox: Microsoft Family Safety for the computer, and the Xbox Family Settings app for the console, including who your kid can chat with.
• PlayStation: Family Management in your PlayStation account sets age limits, spending limits, playtime and chat.
• Nintendo Switch: the free Nintendo Switch Parental Controls app on your phone.
• The apps themselves: Instagram Teen Accounts, YouTube's supervised experience, TikTok Family Pairing, Discord's Family Center and Roblox's parental controls all have their own settings. Link them to your account where you can.
• The whole house: a lot of routers have a family section in their app for pausing the Wi-Fi at bedtime and filtering sites. A family-safe DNS service like Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 for Families or OpenDNS FamilyShield can filter adult sites for every device on your network, including the ones you forgot about.

Controls are the seatbelt, not the driver

I've talked a lot of people through these settings, and the pattern is always the same. Parents set it up once, feel good about it, and then the kid gets a new phone, makes a second account or figures out a workaround, and nobody checks again.

Parental controls aren't a one-time fix. They're a seatbelt. They help when something goes wrong. They don't steer the car.

What actually works is the stuff that doesn't live in a settings menu. Keep devices out of bedrooms at night. Know which apps and games your kid uses, and try a few yourself. Look at the settings together every few months, especially after a birthday or a new device. And make it normal to talk about the weird stuff. If someone online makes them uncomfortable, asks for photos, or asks them to keep a secret or move to a different app, you want to be the first person they tell, not the last.

That last part matters most. When I was a kid in those chat rooms, the worst thing that could happen was getting caught. That's exactly why nobody told their parents anything.

A/S/L, one more time

I don't regret growing up online. Those chat rooms taught me how to type fast, how to read people and how the internet actually works, and in a roundabout way they're part of why I do what I do now.

But I was lucky, and luck isn't a plan. Kids today are going to be online way more than we ever were. Our job isn't to keep them off the internet. It's to make sure the internet knows how old they actually are, and that they know they can come to us when something feels off.

So go check the birthday on your kid's account tonight. If it says they're 23, you already know how that story goes.

— g