Apple spending a large portion of its WWDC keynote on parental controls was surprising for a few reasons. But the biggest thing is that, despite all the airtime, it didn’t announce much new beyond the redesigned interface. Almost all the mentioned features are already present or are being developed in the current options. Why Apple chose to do this is no mystery. You can trace the chain of the latest social media landmark trial against Meta and Google to the protesters outside Cupertino HQ today: Apple is trying to show the world that it is responsible when it comes to your children.
Only it really isn’t. Screen Time is amazing. As a mother of two whose kids used to have Apple Watches, iPads, and iPhones, and are now in their teens (18 and 15), I’ve spent years struggling with Apple’s parental controls. In that time, I’ve gone through what feels like about 2,000 Screen Time passwords and gained a few gray hairs.
Screen Time is not a reliable way to control your child’s device usage; the only real way to limit screen time is to remove the screen. That’s something that Apple may be lagging behind on, and something that, as your child gets older, becomes unanswerable for a number of reasons.
I won’t get into those here, or the debate about how much responsibility one should place on the tech developer versus the parents when it comes to parental controls – that’s a public debate we can have at another time.
My issue with Screen Time is that the most powerful technology company in the world, with a lot of experience in hardware and software, has been testing their “parental controls” segment for years and now they are trying to put lipstick on a pig.
There are tons of complaints on user forums about screen time not working, inaccuracies, kids finding ways to bypass it, and frustration with its limitations. In 2024, Joanna Stern e The Wall Street Journal A bug was reported that allowed children to bypass content restrictions on Screen Time years.
The only good thing Apple has done with Screen Time since I started using it nearly ten years ago is to add an alert that tells you when “someone” has used the Screen Time passcode – and that was last year.
Anyway, here we are, and there are updates coming with iOS 27 this fall that we can be excited about. Request Browsing, which requires them to ask permission to visit a new website, will be good for monitoring children’s web usage. While you’ve been able to ask them to ask you to buy an app download for a while, as I know very well, kids are bypassing restrictions on apps like Discord and TikTok by going to websites instead. You can block individual websites, but that’s a real fun game of whack-a-mole.
One thing Apple still needs to fix here is the ability for a child to re-download an app downloaded from their own or a family member’s account. According to the Discord discussion, my daughter could not re-download the app even after it was removed from her device, without asking, because I downloaded it.
Contact Restrictions, which allow you to manage your child’s contacts and dictate who can call and text them and when, is also not new. And they get angry and frustrated too. I ended up turning it off when neither of us could add contacts to his phone. This was a problem when he was on a school trip and needed to add his teacher’s number, but it became a bigger problem when Screen Time prevented him from calling me. Some of the issues I’ve run into seem to stem from the time it takes to sync across devices, especially when you’re not together. Hopefully the redesigned Screen Time interface also includes behind-the-scenes improvements.
Time Allowances was a feature that Apple spent a lot of time on in the keynote, even if it was a feature. You were able to set time limits on apps for a while. What’s new is that you will now get “expert” guidance on how much time you should allow your child to have with each app or section. Big, extra guilt for the parent if you set the Netflix slide in four hours to finish your report.
Big, extra guilt for the parent if you set the Netflix slide in four hours to finish your report.
What I would like to see are more granular Time Allowance categories. For example, entertainment includes YouTube, Spotify, and Netflix. I’m happy for my child to have Spotify for a few hours, but not YouTube. You can set time limits for individual apps, but that becomes redundant.
Speaking of “more,” managing your kids’ screen time feels like a full-time job. I particularly like the redesigned Screen Time interface, which we hope will be more user-friendly than the current method of digging through several screens in Settings. I’ve lost count of the number of parents who have asked me to help them turn on parental controls on their child’s iPad or iPhone. If you search for “parental controls” in Settings, nothing comes up.
I’m disappointed Apple didn’t make Screen Time a separate app; I think that would improve ease of use, but I really want it to be able to lock with Face ID. Children are smart. My daughter often jumps on my phone without me noticing and unchecks the Block at End of Limit switch for each app. It’s tricky, as you have to dive several menus very deep to find it, which means I usually don’t notice the change. The perils of raising young people with technology.
If Apple wants to take credit for protecting our kids from the dangers of screen time, it needs to start with controls that parents can trust.
Correction, June 8: A previous version of this article incorrectly displayed Concurrent Connection Limits. Communication Safety is a feature that prevents crime and violence in messages.
