How to see what your child asks ChatGPT
The short answer
You have three honest options: look at the chat history together on a shared or supervised account, link accounts with OpenAI's parental controls, or use a monitoring tool that summarises what's discussed. They differ in how much they show and how much trust they cost.
The option we'd argue against is the fourth one: secretly reading everything. It tends to end the conversation you actually need to have.
Option 1: look at the history, together
ChatGPT keeps a sidebar history of every conversation on the account. If your child is younger and uses a family computer or a shared account, the simplest move is to sit down together now and then and have them walk you through it. It costs nothing and builds the habit of talking about AI use. Its limit is obvious: it depends on the account being shared, chats not being deleted, and your child being willing, which gets less realistic with every year of age.
Option 2: OpenAI's parental controls
Since late 2025, OpenAI lets a parent link their account to a teen's. Linked accounts can set quiet hours, reduce some content categories, and turn off features. What they deliberately don't do is show you conversations, or summarise them: OpenAI notifies parents in rare acute-safety situations, but there is no ongoing visibility into what's discussed. That's a defensible privacy stance, and it also means controls alone won't answer the question this page is about.
Option 3: summaries, not transcripts
This is the approach Halo Aware takes. A visible browser extension on the computer your child uses captures their AI chats, an AI distils them into topic summaries (homework, creative writing, feelings, relationships), and the raw text is discarded. You find out that this week was mostly coursework and a lot of late-night chatting about friendships; you don't get a transcript to read. If something serious appears, self-harm, grooming patterns, and similar, you get an alert with a couple of lines of context and a suggested way to open the conversation.
ChatGPT monitoring is on our free plan, and the extension is visible to your child by design. We'd rather you told them; the FAQ says exactly that.
What no tool can see
Phone apps are outside what a browser extension can capture, and we say so on the front page rather than in small print. Whatever tool you pick, the durable version of visibility is the one your child knows about and grudgingly accepts, because the alternative, monitoring they discover later, tends to cost more than it ever showed you.
Topic summaries from ChatGPT, free
One child, ChatGPT, the computer they use: summaries and serious-risk alerts on the free plan, with your child aware it's running.