Some Apple users say its parental controls aren’t working properly. A CEO who has 4 kids called it ‘frustrating.’::Parents told The Wall Street Journal they have to continuously check their Screen Time settings to ensure their children’s usage is limited.

  • Lumberjacked
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    141 year ago

    I have three kids. I am very present. I work from home and I’m constantly monitoring what they are using . Parental controls are a nightmare.

    There are apps that are rated as ages 4+ but they have chat features.

    There are apps you’ve ok’d them to use but requires the parents PIN every time they open it.

    Screen limits randomly reset themselves. A lot of times that means you have allowed something that limit blocked and now you have to ok it again.

    Imagine being out with three friends and you need to know everything they are doing on their phone and have to enter a password on it every 15 min.

    • @onesweetmullet
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      1 year ago

      Another annoying thing is if you approve an app from the App Store once, it’s approved for install forever.

      Going off what you had mentioned about apps with chat features, we’ve run into times where we’ll approve the app thinking it’s fine, but then our kid finds out they can chat with random strangers and divulge personal information. At that point we delete the app, but they can reinstall it whenever they want without requiring parental approval again. 😬

      • @[email protected]
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        51 year ago

        You need to do this on their device, but you can go to the App Store, then purchase history and “hide” it. This makes them ask for approval to redownload.

      • Lumberjacked
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        31 year ago

        Yup. Not to mention we have a Roku, iPhone, Chromebook, and Switch we have to manage, with three kids profiles on each.

        Another thing, I have a 13 year old and a lot of apps (like YouTube) have little kid and adult.

        When I was a kid and had cable there were lots of content edited for mass consumption. You could turn on TBS and watch an R movie edited down to somewhere between PG and PG-13. No one is editing down all this content now.