u/According_Wonder_TA

I’ll just get straight to the point. I’m 15M, about to be 16 this October 2026. Almost a year ago, my dad put parental controls on my phone and iPad. He used this app called Bark, and since it’s a post flair on this sub, I’m assuming you guys already know all about it. Given my experience with past apps like Qustodio, I quickly disabled Bark by going into the Device Management and VPN section of iPhone settings. Fast forward 10 months later, at a post that is a few weeks before now. My parents are divorced, and recently a new coparenting agreement was passed through the courts. It apparently includes the restriction of all social media until I am 18. My parents don’t agree on who came up with the idea and my dad claims it doesn’t even exist, but I’m completely in the dark about it since I can’t see the document. Anyway, my mom has been blocking access to social media sites through the WiFi connection. I’ve gotten around it for some devices, but others still have all social media blocked. Really, any service that could possibly be used to communicate with someone, including Gmail. She also has time limits that block the devices at night, but that’s no big deal.

Is this unreasonable? I’m considering buying my own WiFi network or cellular plan just to combat this. And for anyone asking, my phone is not enabled for cellular. I can only use it on WiFi. This has nothing to do with the previously mentioned parental controls and everything to do with the fact that my dad pays for my phone plan. This was decided long before the events of this story take place. That is to say, I cannot tether with a personal hotspot or use data.

EDIT: Forgot to mention this since it’s summer and not currently relevant, but my mom makes me charge my phone downstairs in the kitchen. Sometimes she’ll let me charge it on my desk in my room, but even during the summer she will not allow it on my nightstand. During the school year, she will not let me call or communicate with my dad after 8:30, and she will not allow device usage after 8:00.

EDIT 2: Two statements seem to be very prevalent in the comments:

1: that I should talk with my parents, respectfully try and convince them otherwise, and continue to ask to see the document. Because this is in a court document, they’re both legally required to do what it says. My dad claims the social media rule doesn’t exist, but my mom is so scared of violating the agreement and facing court penalties (for a rule that might not even be real) that she refuses to change anything. Her and my dad also refuse to show me the document so I can see what’s real or not, I’ve asked both several times. To make all of this worse, they fight like cats and dogs and cannot agree on anything. It’s a miracle they managed to stay in the same room as each other long enough to pass the document. Oh, and my dad lives in California, and me and my mom live in Missouri. So that makes things even harder.

2: that I should just stay off social media anyway. Well, I’d love to, but I can’t. Social media, influencing, content creation is what I want to do for a job. It’s what I aspire to do, and I’ve already been doing it for a year and a half before all this blew up. If I pause this until I’m 18, I will have made the point of starting early so as to have content creation as my full career once I am 18 pointless. My thinking is, if I start at this age, by the time I’m 18, I’ll be making enough money from it to sustain a job, and I won’t have to live with either parent any longer than I need to. So yeah.

Just some extra information: my desire to want to live on my own once I’m 18 and graduated is mostly about independence. Since I was little, I’ve always been very independent. Even when my parents were together I still wanted to move out as soon as I was 18, so I could be my own person, have my own place, be an adult. Although what’s happening with court and social media definitely isn’t helping matters.

I need to start by providing a little bit of background information. It will seem random at first, but will make sense later on.

The ages define me and my partner currently.

TW: Mental health//s****de mentioned briefly

About four years ago (spring 2022) I started having a crush on someone at my school, let’s call her Grace. I ended up being really good friends with her, but eventually found out that she did not like me back.

Fast forward a year and a half or so (December 2023) I started dating this girl, let’s call her Victoria. I didn’t even really like her at first. In fact, I barely knew her. We only shared one class at school and had only ever said half a dozen words to each other. Then I get this random email from her on a random Friday afternoon flat-out asking if I would be her boyfriend. I replied saying no, sorry, but I wasn’t interested in her. Then she started to cry right in the middle of class, and I couldn’t take that. So I quickly typed another email saying sure, we can be together. Then the rest of the class went normal.

Our relationship went well for about six months. Even though I didn’t like her like that at the start, she grew on me over time. Then I fucked up. Around month three or four, I started talking about other girls in front of her. Well, mainly one. Grace, the one I actually had had a crush on. The one I actually liked. She didn’t seem to care a ton about it until month six, when it just got too much for her and she broke up with me.

Yes, I was a dick, and I should not have done that under any circumstances. I realize that now.

So the breakup happened, and we didn’t really talk much after that. She started pulling all these mean pranks on me, and she became friends with someone who would frequently make death threats towards me. But that’s not important, because after another two years, I ended up changing schools, and never spoke to anyone else at that one again.

During what I like to call the Transition Summer (summer 2025) before going into the new school, I started to feel extremely lonely. Romanticallly lonely. Over that summer, we went on a road trip to see my dad’s extended family, and my cousin had a girlfriend, and I had to watch them flirt and act all lovey dovey to each other, while I sat there alone. Worse than that, though, was that it meant that this cousin (whom I was really close to) barely spent any time with me that trip, instead focusing on this girlfriend of his. All this only fueled my loneliness.

By the beginning of the school year, I knew something had to change- and it did. It took a while, but by that December, I was dating a girl from this new school who I had also had a crush on. That relationship lasted maybe two weeks before it all came crashing down- turns out, she never liked me anyway, but she’d cast the blame on her friends, telling me at first that they’d pressured her into breaking up. Anyway, the only important part of that is that it only increased my loneliness. I knew that now, if I didn’t find my way into a good relationship within the next few months, that my mental health might take a turn for the worse. Out of options, I sent a letter to Victoria apologizing for my misdeeds and asking if we could be together again. (Yes, I used snail mail, but it was the only form of communication I had since I didn’t have her number and, in the advent of me being in a new school, we’d moved to another town thirty minutes up the road.)

I felt terrible. I didn’t even like Victoria anymore. But if I didn’t have some sort of romantic relationship, then I was worried that my loneliness might actually cause a mental health crisis. And, as I said earlier, it wasn’t the first time I’d been a dick to her. But it was my only option. We got to see each other exactly once in the three months since our Phase 2 of our relationship started. Other than that, we’ve just been texting, but it all keeps the loneliness at bay.

I feel like garbage that I have to do this. I guess my plan is to eventually, once I’m out of high school, move back to my old town and rekindle the friendship with Grace and try to get her to like me somehow. She was the only one I’d ever had a serious crush on. But the loneliness was so intense, so crushing, that I did what I did.

I can foresee that a common response to this post is gonna be “if you think you’re gonna have a mental health issue because of your loneliness, then just talk to your parents.” That isn’t an option either. About a year ago, right in the middle of this whole mess and towards the end of my last year at my old school, I had to get a su***de risk assessment evaluation. It wasn’t because of anything serious. A paranoid therapist misinterpreted something I said. But it got my parents really rattled and shook. And if I bring this up to them, I’d probably be admitted “so I couldn’t hurt myself.” So that’s out.

I feel terrible about all this. What do I even do in this situation?