By: Brooke Shannon
My oldest daughter leaves for college in one month. I still remember teaching her to ride a bike, and now I'm teaching her how to protect a password. There's something surreal about it: getting someone ready to be 1,400 miles from home and completely on their own online. While I've spent years helping her navigate the digital world with training wheels on, it's time to take them off. Here are the conversations we're having before move-in day.
1. Password Security
Reused passwords are one of the easiest ways for hackers to get into multiple accounts at once, especially the ones that matter most: banking, email, and social media. Before your child leaves, sit down together and do a full inventory of their accounts and passwords. Every password should be unique and hard to guess.
If your child has an iPhone, Apple makes this simple. Go to Settings, search Passwords, and tap the Passwords app. Any passwords saved through Apple will show up there, along with alerts for passwords that are weak, reused, or connected to a known data leak.
I ran this audit on myself recently, and it was eye-opening. I had no idea how many accounts were sharing the same password, or how many had shown up in a data leak without my ever noticing.
2. Two-Factor Authentication and Device Security
Beyond passwords, make sure two-factor authentication is turned on for email, banking, and any account with financial or personal information. It's also worth talking through a plan for a lost or stolen phone or laptop: how Find My iPhone and remote wipe work, and who to call first, whether that's the bank, campus IT, or you.
3. Phishing Emails
Talk through what phishing looks like in practice. Scammers are skilled at spoofing emails to look like they're from a real company, a professor, or even a friend, all designed to trick your child into clicking a link or handing over financial information. Walk through a few real examples together so they know what to watch for before they're living on their own.
4. Sharing Location Details Online
Remind your child not to post exact location details on social media, including their dorm building and room number. It feels harmless, but that level of specificity is more than strangers need to know.
5. Digital Footprint and Future Employers
College is when a lot of kids start posting more freely, sometimes without thinking about who might see it later. It's worth talking about how photos, posts, and even comments on other people's posts can resurface years later, with internship and job recruiters, graduate school admissions committees, and professors all part of the audience now.
6. Screen Time Limits
We don't want moderation around screen time to go out the window the moment mom and dad are a state away. This is the conversation where you circle back to why you've been so intentional about screen time, especially social media, and why it's now on them to carry that responsibility forward. Just because you can spend five hours a day on Instagram doesn't mean you should. The more time we spend on these platforms, the more problems they tend to cause, and that's especially true for a first-year student navigating a brand-new environment on her own.
In our home, we're encouraging our daughter to keep social media under an hour a day, with a financial bonus each month if she does, and an extra bump if she stays under 45 minutes. Since she's helping pay for some of her college costs, it's real motivation. Every family will land on their own version of this, but the conversation about intentional limits, and who's responsible for holding them, is worth having before they leave.
7. Separating Sleep, Study, and Scroll Space
Dorm rooms are tight quarters, so being intentional about where different activities happen matters more than ever. Encourage your child to study at a desk, at the library, or somewhere else on campus rather than in bed on a laptop. The same goes for entertainment and scrolling. Keep the phone away from the bed and aim to shut it down an hour before sleep. We're sending our daughter off with an alarm clock on move-in day, so there's no reason for the phone to be anywhere near the bed.
8. What to Do If Something Feels Off
This last one is less about a specific threat and more about giving her permission to come to us. Whether it's a strange DM, a scam text claiming to be the IRS or a scholarship office, or a job offer that showed up in her inbox and seems too good to be true, kids sometimes hesitate to say something because they're embarrassed or think they should have caught it themselves. Reminding her that our door is always open, no judgment, just call, matters more than any technical safeguard we can put in place.
College is the moment our kids finally navigate the digital world on their own. A few honest conversations now can make all the difference in how ready they feel to do it well.
Brooke Shannon lives in Austin with her husband and three daughters. She is the founder and the Executive Director of the Wait Until 8th pledge. The pledge empowers parents to delay the smartphone for their children until at least the end 8th grade. Join more than 155,000 parents in saying yes to waiting on the smartphone by pledging today.
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