Who is writing this
I am Shannon Potts. I am a parent, a longtime gamer, and I have spent most of my working life in tech, on the marketing, product, sales and support side of it. That last part matters more than it sounds. It means I do not only look at what is in a game. I look at the defaults, the onboarding, what is easy to turn on and hard to turn off, and the gap between what a platform says it offers parents and what a parent can realistically keep configured in a busy week.
I grew up inside this world. I was the kid on the screens, in the games, in the chats, and the parent-side guide that would have helped my parents understand what they were looking at did not exist. This is my attempt at building it now.
I am not a clinician, a teacher or an internet safety authority. When a topic needs that kind of expertise I will say so and point you somewhere better. What I can do is use the thing first, pay attention to what ships turned on and what a kid can quietly flip later, try to tell the difference between what is annoying, what is manipulative and what is mostly adult projection, and then come back and revise when the product changes underneath the piece, which it will.
There is no single correct screen policy. A game that fits one ten-year-old is a bad fit for a different thirteen-year-old. So none of this is here to parent your kid. It is here to give you better inputs, and to be honest about where my read is still shaky. Nobody pays for a verdict here. If a page ever earns something from a link, it says so on that page.