GoKawiilis a senior reviewer with over twenty years of experience. She covers smart home, IoT, and connected tech, and has written previously for Wirecutter, Wired, Dwell, BBC, and US News.
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.
Along with guidance for how much time you should allow your child, the Screen Time interface is getting a redesign to make it easier to use. Image: Apple
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.
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