Make kids’ devices safer
Better bedtimes, healthier habits and clean content
As parents we know just how much kids love Apple devices – and unfortunately we’re also well aware of the problems that can cause. Hands up if you’ve ever had to hide the family iPad, changed the Wi-Fi password without telling the kids or discovered an inappropriate item or app on a family device? Us too, which is why Screen Time is so useful when you’ve got Family Sharing set up on your iCloud account.
Screen Time enables you to set per-person restrictions and time limits, and as we’ll discover it has lots of useful options that give you a great deal of control over your children’s Apple experience. You can use it to encourage better bedtimes by limiting the times when apps can be used. You can use it to block certain kinds of communications or disable entire apps. And you can apply content restrictions so the kids can’t see, hear or read stuff that isn’t ageappropriate when they’re using Apple’s own apps and the App Store.
1 Choose a category
Click on App Limits and on the ‘+’ button to create a new limit. This is category-based, and if you’ve created a new Apple ID for your child the Daily Average column and categories will currently be empty.
2 Add the limit
Pick the category you’d like to limit screen time for, set the limit and Apple will automatically apply those limits to any new apps in that category (and any existing ones if you’re working with an existing Apple ID).
3 Add more limits
App Limits are really flexible, and you can have different limits for different kinds of apps – so for example you might have a one hour daily limit for games but allow longer for educational apps or chat apps.