Screen Time on your child's iPhone
Screen Time is in every iPhone and is free. Set up right, it gives a night lock, time limits for games and social apps, limits on who can reach your child, content filters and a list of what always works, like calls and the school app. You run all of it from your own phone, through Family Sharing.
For younger children there is also Assistive Access, which shows only the apps you chose. The time limits set here apply there too.
Good to know first
- Screen Time has loopholes. They circulate among children, and step 7 closes the most common ones.
- Everything rests on the passcode. If your child knows it, or can guess it, every limit is only a suggestion.
- The setup is laborious, not always logical, and there are bugs. One we ran into: with the web limited to a list of approved sites, entering the passcode to approve a single new site opened the whole web for several minutes. Check the settings twice, especially after an iOS update.
- The settings do not replace the conversation about why the limits exist. Set them together with your child.
What you need
Allow half an hour, less if you skip step 7. You need your own iPhone and your child's.
Here's how
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1
Open Settings on your own phone, tap your name at the top and choose Family Sharing. Add your child, with a child Apple Account of their own if there is not one already.
Screen Time is in your child's profile. Turn on Ask to Buy there, so new apps and purchases go through you. Everything below is done from here, on your own phone, and the passcode never has to be entered on your child's.
Your child's profile under Family Sharing. Two rows do the work: Screen Time and Ask to Buy.
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2
Open Screen Time in your child's profile and turn it on. Set a Screen Time passcode: four digits that cannot be guessed. No birthday, and not the phone's usual passcode. You can change it later under Manage Screen Time, Change Screen Time Passcode.
Your child does not get the passcode. Otherwise the responsibility is back with the child, against content made to be irresistible. A bit like giving a child an enormous bag of sweets and asking for one a day. The passcode puts the responsibility with you.
The passcode carries every limit below. It is yours.
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3
If you do only one thing in this guide, do this one. Under Screen Time, choose Downtime, turn on Scheduled and set the hours, for example 7 pm to 8 am on school nights. Under Customise Days the weekend gets its own hours.
Turn on Block at Downtime. Without it the night lock is only a reminder. With it the phone locks, and your child can ask for more time, which you approve from your phone. For a freer evening there is Ignore Downtime Until Schedule.
During downtime only calls and the apps you choose in step 5 work. With a charger in the hallway, the phone spends the night outside the bedroom.
The schedule plus Block at Downtime is the night lock.
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4
Under App Limits, choose Add Limit. Choose whole categories, for example Games and Social, so the limit also covers apps downloaded tomorrow. Set the time together with your child. Turn on Block at End of Limit, otherwise the limit is only a reminder.
Two more things:
- Messages and FaceTime cannot be switched off anywhere else. A time limit here keeps them within bounds, for example 30 minutes a day.
- The limit can be set to 0. An app at 0 seconds is in practice closed to your child, but can always be opened with the passcode. Safari suits this: closed day to day, open for you when a sign-in or an errand needs the web.
0 s: closed to your child, open with your passcode. Messages gets a daily ration instead.
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5
A limit only holds if the phone still does what matters. Under Always Allowed, add what should never be closed: Maps, the school app, SL. Phone is always on the list and cannot be removed.
The same list applies during downtime. Then calls and these apps work, nothing else. So there is no everyday reason to ask for the passcode, and no reason to hand it out.
This works when everything else is closed.
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6
Communication Limits control who your child can reach and be reached by, in Phone, FaceTime and Messages. Known emergency numbers always work.
During Screen Time: choose Contacts Only, so unknown numbers do not get through. During Downtime: choose Specific Contacts and add the parents. Then you can always reach each other in the evening, and friends wait until breakfast.
Turn on Manage your child's Contacts, so you run the contact list from your phone. Turn off Allow Contact Editing if the list is to be entirely yours.
Daytime: contacts only. Evening and night: only you. Emergency numbers always work.
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7
The biggest step, ten minutes. Under Content & Privacy Restrictions, turn it on and go through four things:
- iTunes & App Store Purchases: set Deleting Apps to Don't Allow. Then an app with a time limit cannot be deleted and reinstalled with a reset counter. New apps and purchases are approved through Ask to Buy.
- Allowed Apps & Features: switch off what your child does not need, like Mail, FaceTime or AirDrop. What you switch off disappears from the Home Screen without being deleted.
- App Store, Media, Web & Games: set age ratings for apps, films and music. Under Web Content: choose Limit Adult Websites, or Only Approved Websites for the youngest, where you list the sites yourself.
- Allow Changes To: set Passcode & Face ID, Accounts and Mobile Data to Don't Allow, so none of it changes without you. Apple Intelligence and Siri can be switched off here too, for the youngest.
This is where the back doors close: delete-and-reinstall, the web, account changes and settings changes.
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8
Screen Distance, under Screen Time, reminds your child when the phone is held too close to the face. It costs nothing to turn on.
A black-and-white screen is part of Accessibility. Under Settings, Accessibility, Display & Text Size, Colour Filters, choose Greyscale. A screen without colour pulls less, and everything works as usual.
Greyscale is under Accessibility. A calmer screen in a minute.
Questions? Write through the contact form or on Instagram, @stillna.app (opens in a new tab).