The new iPhone parental controls, set up right
Apple rebuilt Screen Time. Four switches worth an afternoon — and one honest note about what none of them do.
Apple rebuilt Screen Time. The new version was previewed in June and lands on phones this fall, and it fixes the two things that made the old one useless: it was buried, and it was all-or-nothing.
Here’s what actually changed, and what to do about each piece.
The setup wizard finally asks the right questions. Creating a child account used to mean guessing your way through a settings menu nobody could find twice. The new flow walks you through age, app permissions and web access at setup, and it asks for your kid’s real age up front. Put the real age in. Everything downstream keys off that number — and if you once rounded a birthday up to skip a prompt, that number is still quietly running the phone today. Go check what you entered.
Ask to Browse replaces the blunt web filter. Instead of a blocklist that nukes half the internet and still misses things, your kid requests a site and you approve it from your phone. Genuinely good for under-12s. For a teenager it turns into an interruption machine — by week two you’re approving everything without reading it, which is worse than not having it on, because now you think you have coverage.
Time Allowances are a budget, not a curfew. The old model was a hard daily cap, app by app. The new one hands over a pool of minutes your kid spends where they want. This is the one worth raising at the table, because the interesting part isn’t the number — it’s that they choose how to spend it, and then live with running out on a Thursday. That’s a skill. A cap isn’t.
App Store ratings now split into 13+, 16+ and 18+. The old 12+/17+ bands filed a messaging app next to a shooter. Finer bands mean the automatic filter does more of the work on its own. But it filters by rating, not by what happens inside. A 13+ app with open chat is still an app with open chat.
Set all of this up in one afternoon. Then be clear about what you bought: a few years of margin. The controls hold a line while the real work happens somewhere else — knowing which apps your kid actually lives in, and being the person they’d tell if something went sideways. A good setting can hold a line. It can’t teach anyone where the line is.