As a parent of an 11-year-old, messaging is the hardest thing to handle. If you allow kids to message their friends, their friends will send all sorts of inappropriate content, exposing them to essentially everything bad on the internet. If you don't allow kids to message their friends, then they will miss out on fun events that all of their friends are doing.
At least at our local public school, when I talk with parents of high schoolers, 100% of them have given up and allowed messaging.
So by 14 I think you really can't "shield them" from internet content. What you can do is fight back against the human desire to waste lots of time, by limiting screen time. I think that's the best we're going to get.
Do you have thoughts on allowing messaging but making it clear you have access to those same messaging accounts? E.g you have a backup iPhone signed into the same iCloud account as the kid and occasionally scroll through messages to check for bad stuff?
Yeah, I have tried it out, and that's why I am confident that 11-year-olds are happily sending each other every sort of bad thing that exists on the internet!
I can tell my own kid, hey it's really inappropriate to send out thing X to a group chat. But I can't really police all the other kids.
I can at least say, hey I saw this stupid rumor. You'd have to be a complete idiot to actually believe that story is true. But, you know, it feels like I am trying to shovel back the tide.
We have an iMessages WiFi AP that only allows iMessage and FaceTime.
Very easy to set up and you can then turn off general purpose internet without ostracizing them from their friends.
I think OP was saying the most damaging content is arriving via iMessage.
It might show link previews depending on how configured but likely the damaging content would be links to YouTube etc I imagine
I do wonder what the dumb hammer of a blanket school ban is going to do. A bunch of states are trying that.
Most "school bans" that I have seen so far are actually things like, "A teacher-enforced official policy of no using phones during class." In other words, usually the same as the status quo, because what teacher says, "yes go ahead and use your phone while I'm talking to you".
The local public high school makes students put their phones in pouches during classes. It seems good at preventing distraction but doesn't really do much about kids wasting lots of time on social media, sharing terrible material on social media, communicating between classes, or after classes. Probably better than nothing.
Nothing dumb about it, unless you are not a parent. No reason for kids to be scrolling in school.
People are incredible inquisitive and intelligent about finding ways around bans. Kids are this, intensified. They literally have nothing but time.