Apple spending a big chunk of its WWDC keynote on parental controls was surprising for several reasons. But the biggest is that, despite all the airtime, it didn’t announce much new beyond a redesigned interface. Almost all the features touted already exist or are upgrades to current options. Why Apple chose to do this isn’t a mystery. You can trace the threads from the recent landmark social media trials against Meta and Google to the protesters outside the Cupertino HQ today: Apple is trying to show the world it’s being responsible when it comes to your children.
Only it’s really not. Screen Time sucks. As a mother of two whose children have had Apple Watches, iPads, and iPhones, and who are now entering their late teens (18 and 15), I’ve spent years grappling with Apple’s parental controls. In that time, I’ve gone through what feels like approximately 2,000 Screen Time passcodes and gained several new gray hairs.
Screen Time is simply not a reliable way to control your child’s device use; the only real way to limit screen time is to remove the screen. That’s something Apple is unlikely to ever get behind, and something that, as your child gets older, becomes increasingly untenable for a whole host of reasons.
I’m not going to get into those here, or the argument about how much responsibility one should place on the developer of the technology versus the parents when it comes to parental control — that’s a whole societal debate we can have another time.
My issue with Screen Time is that the world’s most powerful technology company, with reams of expertise in hardware and software, has half-assed its “parental controls” for years and is now trying to put lipstick on a pig.
There are mountains of complaints on user forums about Screen Time not working, being inaccurate, kids finding ways to bypass it, and frustrations over its limitations. In 2024, Joanna Stern at The Wall Street Journal reported on a bug that allowed kids to bypass content restrictions on Screen Time for years.
The only good thing Apple has done for Screen Time since I started using it nearly a decade ago is to add an alert that tells you when “someone” has used the Screen Time passcode — and that was last year.
Still, here we are, and there are some updates coming with iOS 27 this fall to be happy about. Ask to Browse, which requires them to request permission to visit a new website, will be good for monitoring kids’ web use. While you’ve been able to require them to Ask to Buy to download an app for a while, as I know well, kids bypass restrictions on apps like Discord and TikTok by going to the 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 redownload an app that was previously downloaded on theirs or a family member’s account. Per the Discord debacle, my daughter could redownload the app even after it was deleted from her device, without having to ask, because I had downloaded it.
Communication Limits, which lets you manage your child’s contacts and designate who they can call and message and when, also aren’t new. And they are also fiddly and frustrating. I ended up turning it off when neither of us could add contacts to her phone. This was an issue when she was on a school field trip and needed to add her teacher’s number, but became a bigger problem when Screen Time prevented her 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 some behind-the-scenes improvements.
Time Allowances was the feature Apple spent the most time on in the keynote, even though it was already a feature. You’ve been able to set time limits on apps for a while. What’s new is that you’ll now get some “expert” guidance as to how much time you should let your child have per app or category. Great, more parent guilt when you set the Netflix slider to four hours so you can finish your report.
Great, more parent guilt when you set the Netflix slider to four hours so you can finish your report.
What I’d like to see are more granular Time Allowance categories. For example, Entertainment includes YouTube, Spotify, and Netflix. I’m happy for my kid to have Spotify for several hours, but not YouTube. You can set time limits for individual apps, but that gets to be a lot.
Speaking of “a lot,” managing screen time for your kids feels like a full-time job. I’m most interested in the redesigned Screen Time interface, which is hopefully a lot more usable than the current method of having to dig 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 kid’s iPad or iPhone. When you search “parental controls” in Settings, nothing shows up.
I am disappointed Apple didn’t make Screen Time a separate app; I think that would improve ease of use, but I mostly want it so I can lock it down with Face ID. Kids are wily. My daughter regularly hops onto my phone without me seeing and unchecks the Block at End of Limit toggle for each app. It’s sneaky, as you have to dive several menus too deep to find it, meaning I often don’t notice the change. The perils of raising a tech-savvy teen.
If Apple wants to take credit for protecting our kids from the dangers of screen time, then it needs to start with controls parents can rely on.
