Setting up parental controls on your child’s iPhone

Family Sharing is Apple’s way of linking parent and child accounts. Once your child is a member of your family, you can see and change the most important settings on their phone remotely from yours. It is the single biggest quality-of-life win in this whole guide, so we start here.

If your child already has an Apple ID

1. On your own iPhone, open Settings.
2. Tap your name at the very top.
3. Tap Family Sharing. If you have never set it up before, follow the prompts to create your family. You will be the organizer.
4. Tap Add Member → Invite People and send the invite to the Apple ID email address your child already uses.
5. On your child’s phone, accept the invitation when it arrives.
6. Back on your phone, in Family Sharing, tap your child’s name and make sure their account is marked as a child (under 18). If it is listed as an adult, you will not be able to manage their Screen Time settings remotely.

If your child does not yet have an Apple ID

Children under 13 need a special Child Apple ID created by a parent. For 13–16, you can still create one this way and it comes with the child protections turned on by default. This is the path I recommend.

1. On your own iPhone, open Settings → tap your name → Family Sharing.
2. Tap Add Member → Create Child Account(the label may say “Create an Account for a Child”).
3. Follow the prompts. You will enter your child’s name, date of birth, and pick an Apple ID email and password. You will also be asked to confirm you are the parent using your own Apple ID password or Face ID.
4. When you reach Ask to Buy, turn it on. This means any app purchase or download your child tries to make sends a request to your phone for approval. Keep this on. You can always approve or deny in one tap.
5. Sign the new Apple ID in on your child’s phone:Settings → tap the top banner → sign in with the new credentials you just created.

Fix a child account with the wrong date of birth

Many children created their Apple ID themselves at some point and entered a fake adult birth date to get around Apple’s age minimum (13 in the US; 14–16 in some other countries). The account then shows as an adult in Family Sharing, and most Screen Time parental controls are unavailable because Apple does not let parents control an adult’s account. The fix is to correct the birth date, which triggers Apple to convert the account to a proper child account with full parental controls.

1. First, make sure the child’s Apple ID is already a member of your Family Sharing group (step 1 above). This is a prerequisite — the birth date change only works for family members.
2. On your child’s phone (or any web browser), go toaccount.apple.com and sign in with your child’s Apple ID and password.
3. Go to Personal Information → tapBirthday.
4. Enter the correct birth date and save.
5. If the new age is below your country’s independent-Apple-ID threshold, Apple will ask you to approve the change from the Family Sharing organizer’s phone (yours). You will get a notification. Approve it.
6. Apple may then prompt to convert the account to a child account. Accept. The account keeps its email address, its purchases, its iCloud photos, and everything else tied to the Apple ID — only the age and permission model change.
7. Once conversion is done, go back toSettings → Screen Time on your phone. Your child’s name should now appear under Family with full Screen Time controls available. Continue with Section 2 (passcode) from here.

Everything in the rest of this guide depends on this one step. Without a Screen Time passcode, any limit you set can be disabled in about ten seconds by tapping Turn Off Screen Time. With a passcode, every change has to go through you.

How to set it

1. On your own iPhone, open Settings →Screen Time.
2. Scroll down and tap your child’s name underFamily.
3. Tap Lock Screen Time Settings.
4. Pick a four-digit code. Enter it twice.
5. When iOS asks for a recovery Apple ID, enter your own Apple ID, not your child’s. This is the most common mistake parents make. If you enter the child’s Apple ID here, they can reset the Screen Time passcode themselves from their own phone and undo everything in this guide.

What if you forget it

If you set the recovery Apple ID correctly in step 5 above, you can reset the passcode by tapping Forgot Passcode? and entering your own Apple ID password. If you skipped that step, the only way to clear a forgotten Screen Time passcode is to factory-reset the phone, which wipes everything. Set the recovery Apple ID.

Apple has a built-in content filter that hides adult websites in Safari. It is decent, and it is free, but it only works in Safari and browsers that use Apple’s web engine. Chrome, Firefox, and Brave are weaker at enforcing it. The simplest answer: keep Safari with filters on, and remove all other browsers (we do that in the next section).

Turn on content restrictions

1. From your phone: Settings → Screen Time→ tap your child’s name →Content & Privacy Restrictions.
2. Turn on the toggle at the top. Every setting below it is now active.
3. Tap Content Restrictions.
4. Set the following to age-appropriate values:
   • Music, Podcasts, News, Fitness → Clean
   • Movies → PG-13 (or your country’s equivalent)
   • TV Shows → TV-14
   • Books → Clean
   • Apps → 12+
5. Scroll down to Web Content and set it toLimit Adult Websites. You can add specific sites to the “Always Allow” or “Never Allow” lists if you want to get granular.

This is one of the most important and most overlooked features Apple ships. Communication Safety uses on-device machine learning to detect nudity in images before they are shown to your child. If an inappropriate image is sent or received, the phone blurs it and offers the child resources instead of displaying it. The analysis happens entirely on the device — Apple does not see the images, and neither does anyone else. It is free, private, and off by default. Turn it on.

Turn on Communication Safety

1. From your phone: Settings → Screen Time→ tap your child’s name →Communication Safety.
2. Toggle it on. On iOS 17 and newer, this covers Messages, AirDrop, FaceTime, Contact Posters, the Photos picker, and third-party apps that use Apple’s content-picker API. On iOS 15–16 it covers Messages only.

Lock down AirDrop (two-minute fix, big impact)

Strangers on trains, in malls, and outside schools sometimes AirDrop explicit images to nearby phones with AirDrop set to “Everyone”. This is called cyber-flashing and it is a real, documented problem. The fix takes ten seconds.

1. On your child’s phone: Settings →General → AirDrop.
2. Set it to Contacts Only. (Since iOS 16.2, iOS automatically reverts AirDrop from “Everyone” back to “Contacts Only” after 10 minutes, but it is still worth locking it in manually.)

Audit and remove

Go through your child’s home screen and App Library together. Or alone, if you prefer. Identify what needs to go: social media you have not agreed to, third-party browsers, games you are not comfortable with, chat apps you do not recognize. Common candidates are any browser other than Safari, and social platforms with known algorithmic-feed problems.

1. Long-press the app icon.
2. Tap Remove App → Delete App. Do not tap “Remove from Home Screen” — that only hides it, it stays installed.

Lock installing and deleting apps

Once the phone is clean, stop your child from being able to dirty it again.

1. From your phone: Settings → Screen Time→ tap your child’s name →Content & Privacy Restrictions →iTunes & App Store Purchases.
2. Set Installing Apps to Don’t Allow. From now on, any new app install has to go through you via the Ask to Buy notification on your phone.
3. Set Deleting Apps to Don’t Allow. This stops your child from uninstalling an app you want monitored — for example, Messages, or a tracked homework app.
4. Set In-app Purchases to Don’t Allow. This prevents surprise charges inside games and apps.

Separate from blocking bad content, this step reduces how much personal information apps collect about your child while they use the phone. It takes about five minutes and is almost all toggles.

1. Location Services. Settings → Privacy & Security →Location Services. Scroll through the app list and set anything that does not truly need location to Never. Maps, Weather, and camera-based apps can stay onWhile Using. Social apps rarely need it.
2. Photos. Settings → Privacy & Security →Photos. Any app set to “Full Access” can see every photo on the phone. Change to Limited Access orNone for anything that does not need the full library.
3. Microphone and Camera. Settings → Privacy & Security. Check the Microphone and Camera lists. Turn off any app that should not have them.
4. Contacts. Settings → Privacy & Security →Contacts. Most apps do not need your child’s address book. Turn them off.
5. Tracking. Settings → Privacy & Security →Tracking. Turn Allow Apps to Request to TrackOFF. This stops apps from linking your child’s activity across other companies’ apps for advertising purposes.
6. Apple Advertising. Settings → Privacy & Security →Apple Advertising. Turn Personalized Ads OFF.

Downtime — the phone’s “bedtime mode”

Downtime is a scheduled block of hours when only the apps you allow can be used. Everything else is hidden and unusable.

1. From your phone: Settings → Screen Time→ tap your child’s name → Downtime.
2. Turn it on, set a schedule, and save.

Always Allowed — apps that work during Downtime

1. Back in your child’s Screen Time settings, tapAlways Allowed.
2. Keep this list short and functional: Phone, Messages, Maps, and anything schoolwork needs. Nothing social. Nothing entertainment.

App Limits — daily time caps

1. Tap App Limits → Add Limit.
2. Pick a category or specific apps, set a daily cap, and save. The cap resets at midnight.

Communication Limits — who your child can talk to

Communication Limits restrict who your child can call, FaceTime, or Message during screen-time hours and during Downtime. This is separate from everything above and easy to forget.

1. Tap Communication Limits.
2. Set During Screen Time to Contacts Only.
3. Set During Downtime to Specific Contacts, and add the people your child absolutely needs to reach at night (parents, a small handful of close friends or family).

Apple’s web filter only covers Safari and apps using Apple’s web engine. It does nothing about ads and trackers inside TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, or Snapchat, and nothing about links those apps open in their own in-app browsers. A device-wide DNS filter plugs all of those holes at the network layer. For a 12–16 year old who uses apps more than browsers, this is arguably more effective than Safari’s filter.

This is labelled “advanced” only because it is one extra app install. It is genuinely a two-minute setup.

Recommended: Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 for Families (free)

1. On your child’s phone, open the App Store and install1.1.1.1: Faster Internet (by Cloudflare). It’s free and has no account.
2. Open the app, tap through the intro, and tapInstall VPN Profile when prompted. (Despite the name, this is a DNS profile, not a traditional VPN — it does not route your child’s traffic through a third-party server, it just changes which DNS it uses.)
3. In the app’s settings, look for 1.1.1.1 for Familiesand choose Block malware and adult content.
4. Toggle the app on. Verify it works by trying to open an adult site in Safari — it should fail to load. That is the filter working.
5. While you are here, go to Settings →Screen Time → Content & Privacy Restrictions → VPN and set it toDon’t Allow. This freezes the current VPN/DNS configuration so your child cannot turn it off.

If you want more control: NextDNS

Cloudflare gives you exactly one knob: adult content on or off. If you want category-level controls (block gambling, dating, piracy, or specific sites), query logs so you can see what the phone is talking to, or scheduled rules for school hours, NextDNS is the next step up. The free tier has a 300,000 queries/month cap that a single heavy-use iPhone will likely hit in 1–2 weeks; past that cap filtering falls back to unfiltered. The paid tier is around $20/year for unlimited queries. Check nextdns.io for current pricing and setup instructions.

Every Sunday, spend five minutes looking at Screen Time reports on your own phone. This is not about surveillance — it is about noticing drift before it becomes a problem.

1. Settings → Screen Time → tap your child’s name → See All App & Website Activity.
2. Look at the top three apps by time used. Are they what you expect? Anything new that sneaked on?
3. Look at Pickups — how often was the phone picked up, and what was the first app opened each time? The first-app number is a good proxy for what the phone is “for” in your child’s mind.
4. Look at Notifications — which apps are generating the most interruptions? Anything excessive is worth muting inSettings → Notifications.
5. Adjust one thing if needed. Not ten. One.

Subscriptions and purchase history

Even with Ask to Buy on and in-app purchases blocked, it is worth reviewing purchases once a month. On your phone: Settings→ tap your name → Media & Purchases →View Account → Purchase History. You can filter by family member. Also check Subscriptions on the same screen — this is where recurring charges live.

Notification hygiene and Focus modes

Every push notification is a small request for your child’s attention. Most of them do not deserve it. On your child’s phone, go to Settings → Notifications and turn off notifications for everything that is not a real person (friends, family, school). Games, social feeds, shopping apps — off.

Consider also setting up a School Focus on the child’s phone that auto-silences non-essential apps during school hours: Settings → Focus →+ → pick a template → schedule it.

When your child turns 13, 16, or 18

• 13: Apple allows the child to manage their own Apple ID password and some settings. Family Sharing controls still apply. You do not need to do anything.
• 16: Consider easing specific limits as trust builds. Revisit the conversation in Section 11 every 6–12 months. Static limits from age 12 through 16 rarely survive.
• 18: Your child automatically leaves the “child” role in Family Sharing and all Screen Time parental controls stop applying. They keep their Apple ID. This happens on their 18th birthday, not gradually. Be ready for the conversation before it happens, not after.

The hardest part of this guide is not the settings. It is the conversation. Here is how to think about it.

The internet your child is stepping into is not the internet you grew up with. The biggest platforms in their life — TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat — are engineered by some of the largest companies in history, staffed by thousands of engineers whose explicit job is to keep your child’s attention for as many minutes a day as possible. The feeds are tuned by machine-learning systems that optimize for engagement, not wellbeing. The content is designed to be irresistible. The notifications are timed to be unignorable. The business model is built on outcompeting a teenager’s self-regulation, and it is extremely good at its job.

No adult resists this well. A 13-year-old’s still-developing prefrontal cortex — the part of the brain responsible for impulse control — cannot resist it at all. That is not a failing of your child. It is a fact of biology meeting a product built to exploit it.

When you sit down to have this conversation, the framing that matters is this: you are not restricting their freedom. You are doing the job the platforms refuse to do. You are not punishing them. You are not saying you do not trust them. You are protecting them from content that is designed by adults, for profit, to hijack their attention, their mood, their sleep, their self-image, and their relationships. No reasonable parent would hand a 13-year-old a pack of cigarettes. The algorithmic feed is not categorically different.

Expect pushback. Expect it to feel unfair to them. Expect them to argue that their friends have no limits (some will be telling the truth; many will not). Expect the pushback to get louder before it gets quieter. That is the addiction talking, not the child. The same kid who fights you on Downtime at 13 will, at 22, thank you for protecting the version of them that could not protect itself.

You do not need to keep the Screen Time passcode secret to be honest about the rest. Tell your child what you are doing and why. Acknowledge that the limits are not permanent — they will grow with the child, and you will revisit them together as trust builds. Invite them to tell you when something feels wrong, or when a limit is getting in the way of something legitimate. Keep the door open. The goal is not a locked-down phone. The goal is giving a developing brain room to develop before handing it the full firehose.