By Dan Moren for Macworld

April 17, 2024 5:49 AM PT

Apple’s parental controls need some guidance

Last week, my family and I—like so many others in the U.S.—hopped in a car to try and catch sight of a total eclipse. And, like so many other parents, I planned to distract my kid for some part of this lengthy adventure with an iPad.

As my kid is still under two, there hasn’t been a lot of time spent with screens, aside from occasionally “playing” a game on our phones or watching some videos of trains. This marked the first time I planned to actually hand over a whole device—albeit still with the idea of just watching some downloaded videos—and I found as I set up the iPad what likely a legion of parents before me has also discovered: setting up an Apple device for a kid is kind of annoying.

I’ve been covering Apple for almost twenty years, so you’d be forgiven for thinking this wouldn’t shock me, but the simple truth is that, not unlike the Matrix, this is something you have to experience for yourself. Ultimately, the conclusion I reached was that Apple should really improve this experience for all of us time- and attention-strapped parents in a variety of ways.

Everything is permissible

Let’s start by saying that Apple does have an extensive set of parental controls baked in to its operating systems, all now collected under the aegis of Screen Time. Ostensibly this set of features not only allow parents to monitor how much time their kids spend using devices, but also control the limits of which apps can be used, which settings can be changed, and so on.

All to the good, but as I—again, a veteran technology journalist of almost two decades—embarked upon setting this all up, one thing quickly became clear: it is a pain. By default, everything is on and allowed, even when the iCloud account you login to is a child’s account (more on which in a bit).

One thing that would be helpful here is some kind of kids profile, where permissions are locked down by default, allowing parents to selectively enable features they want kids to have access to. This also makes sense from the perspective of enabling more features as kids get older. It’d also be handy if it was an ad hoc mode you could go into, rather than having to spend the time setting up all the various permissions, the same way that Netflix has a kids profile that you can log into with just kids content. Reduce the friction by removing all the fiddling.

That’s not to say such a feature would be enough, but it would be a good jumping-off point.

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