Transcription
If you're like me, you've probably wondered what is the best way to set up parental controls on your kids' iPads or iPhones. If you're already there, and either way, keep watching. So, should you create a passcode that only you know, and you become the complete gatekeeper each time they want to go on? Or do you let them semi-manage their device, but you lock down what's needed remotely?
I wouldn't say there is a right or wrong way, but after lots of trials, I think I have the better way, which I'm going to show you in this video. Stay to the end, and I'll give you some bonus tricks, such as how to stop kids from redownloading apps from the App Store that you've already deleted from their device.
Now, before I get deep into the details, there are a few basic steps you must take before attempting to set up this correctly. If you're confident you've passed this point, feel free to skip ahead by using the chapters. So today, I am starting fresh with a brand new iPad Air with the M3 chip for my youngest son.
Now, before you can do any of this, you'll need to ensure you have your own iCloud accounts set up and that all family members are added. For this, I will use my own iPad for. And if you haven't added your child yet, go into your iCloud settings and click "Add Member" and fill in the necessary details about your child's account. The great thing about iCloud is, with the right plan, you can share online storage, music, and app purchases, reminder lists, news, Fitness, Arcade apps, and much more with my family.
Created, I can move on to my child's device. I won't bore you with some of the basic setup, like selecting languages and Wi-Fi and all that, but there will be a point where you choose what child in the family you are setting up the device for. Select the correct child, and then you will also come to a point where you need to set up a passcode for the child to use on their device. I like to move it down to a simple four-digit code for the kids, and later on, they can also set up Face or Touch ID if they have it, depending on their iPad model.
Since my kids are six and eight, I set up a few more things for them. I turn on things like auto-updates so apps stay updated, and I turn off "Send to Apple" any analytics. Since this is for a child, Apple will not ask you if you want to have certain iPad settings off by default, like multitasking gestures, shake to undo, corner swipe actions, and more. And personally, I think this is a great idea based on how I have seen my own kids use iPads and some of the frustrations they face when trying to use the device. If you want to allow Apple Intelligence or Siri, you will have your chance here during this process as well, but for any of this, you can always readjust in the Settings app.
Once I'm set up, I'll ensure the child is logged into their iCloud account that I have already created for them, and I'll give their device a clean name like "Calvin's iPad" so I can keep our devices straight on the network.
Now let's get into the meat and potatoes of setting up parental controls. 95% of what you need to do is all within the Screen Time area of your Settings app, and what I'm going to do now is show what can be done either on the child's iPad or on your own Mac, iPad, or iPhone.
All right, so on my iPad, I'm going to open the Settings app, and then from there, you know, you have all these different options. You go into Screen Time. Here I have my own Screen Time settings and whatnot, and we can see how bad I've been. But we're going to move down to my two kids, and today we are setting up Calvin. So I'm going to select Calvin.
In here, we have all these different options, and we're going to go through one by one, and I'm going to kind of show you what you need to set up. So when you start, we can go to Downtime, and I'm going to have to put in my Screen Time password that I have set on the device. And this basically allows you to say, is there parts of the day that you don't want your kid using your device? So maybe it's during school hours, or in the morning when they get up, or late at night if they're going to sneak down and find their iPad somewhere. This is where you can do that, and you can change it by certain days.
Where I do put the limit, and you know, it's up to you, is in App Limits. And so right here, you can choose, do you want to block social apps, or games, or creativity, or education, or whatever? I don't know why you'd want to just say "select education," but you can put time limits on it, and that's what's important to us. So I simply say, for example, 2 hours is the max in a day. It doesn't matter what app it is, whatever. I don't want you to have too much screen time. And so I will select all apps and categories, and then for the time, you can change it to whatever you'd like: 2 hours, 3 hours, 5 hours, 5 minutes, whatever the case. And that is it.
And when that takes effect, they will see a warning on their screen that says, "Hey, 5 minutes left." Gives them a little warning, and then it'll stop them from being able to go into those apps. And it'll sometimes give, you know, a little thing where they can press, "Hey, I want to ask for more time," or an extension to turn this off the rest of the day. And you, as a parent, on your own device, can grant that if you would like.
If you scroll down a little further to "Always Allowed," this is where, you know, you can have some flexibility. So, for example, I have it so they can get to the phone, which is kind of by default. You can't get past Messages, FaceTime, and Maps. And again, you can go through all your apps and see what you want to customize. But, you know, for us, if they want to call the grandparents on FaceTime, or we're at the neighbor's house and they need to send us a message, maybe it's an emergency, and we've got to keep training them on how to do that and who to call or contact. Those are good things, and we want to allow that. So, you know, if they want to play around on Maps, or we're on a road trip, or they need to get a hold of us, fine, so be it. But otherwise, they're going to be locked out from everything else.
Moving on, we have "Screen Distance." So this is just going to help with reducing eye strain and other issues that can occur from having a device too close to your face for too long. So we leave that on.
And then going down to this "Communication" section, we have different communication limits. So if we click into that, who can they contact from that device? Is it the same during downtime? Or do you want to be able to manage your kids' contacts? And I'm actually going to select that. But what that will be able to have me do is I can put in contacts for Mom, Dad, you know, us, grandparents, neighbors, and I can make sure that there's no editing of those.
Then, on "Communication Safety," this is going to just help with analysis of photos, you know, I think coming in and out and making sure we're not seeing things that we shouldn't. I know this had a little controversy in recent history, but for the kids, we're going to leave that on and just hope for the best. And for the analytics, generally, I know Apple asks for a few different types of analytics in various apps. I just keep that off.
Next, we're going down to the restrictions. So "Content & Privacy Restrictions," and there's a lot here, but let's start breaking it down. So if we go into "iTunes & App Store Purchases," I do want them to be able to install apps. I don't want them to delete apps because sometimes they'll take off stock apps that I think are important. I think they've deleted Safari or something like that before, and that's not cool. So I'm going to make sure that I turn that off.
In-app purchases, I'm going to allow. No, I'll disallow it, and I'm going to explain more in a little bit. But for example, this installing app thing, it's really not a problem. If they go to the App Store and they find something that they like, I'm going to set it up where they have to get permission before they can buy the app. And by "buy," I mean it can be a free app, it can be one that costs money, but once they click to download it, there's going to be a notification that goes to the parents or guardians of our household, which is me and my wife, and we will see on our phone or Apple Watch that Calvin is asking for an app. We can click into it, see more detail, and then we can say "Accept," and once we do that, it'll begin downloading on his device.
If I said "Don't Allow Installing of Apps," they wouldn't be able to go to the App Store and initiate anything, and then it has to have me go back to their device and have it in hand to do all that navigation and put in passwords, undo the settings, redo them. It's a mess. So for me, allowing the install is great. I will grant them permission on a case-by-case basis. And then for "Require Password," I put "Don't Require." What I have found over the years is you can drive yourself batty always having to punch in passwords. If the proper measures are in place, we should be fine.
For "Allow Apps & Features," there's nothing here that I would want to turn off or that I don't think they should use, so I'm going to be fine with that one, but you can do it to your heart's content.
"App Store Media," "Web," and "Games." So for music, podcasts, you can say, do you want clean or explicit? We're going to stay clean for now. Music videos, you can turn on or off. Music profiles, so movies, TV shows, books, you know, all these, I'm going to keep where they kind of are right now. I don't think it'll be reading naughty books on here. Apps, I keep it a bit higher. I've seen, you know, some fun robot games, and yes, they shoot each other, but you're going to have to be the parent or guardian that decides, you know, what you want to be able to tolerate or not. But you can obviously modify that. App Clips, I'm going to allow.
Web content, you can have it unrestricted, you can choose certain sites that they only can see, or you can limit adult websites. Now, a lot of this isn't going to be completely foolproof, and will they be able to Google something and see an image here and there? Sure. But that's just kind of the default setting that I do as well. But if there is a site that they are abusing and you don't want them to go to it, you can always put something in the "Never Allow" section, which will take care of that problem.
And then in the "Game Center," there's another series of questions you can answer: multiplayer games, can they add friends, connect, can they record their screen, do private messaging, so forth. Again, more stuff you can dive into, but all these will be able to allow you to say "Allow" or "Not Allow" based on what you would like.
And then going back into the "Content & Privacy Restrictions," so we took care of the App Store, media, web, games. Now you can go to "Intelligence & Siri." Do you want them to be able to do those image creation with some of the new AI tools that they're not that great anyway? But yeah, it's just goofy artwork that they can play with. ChatGPT, so I'm going to allow that. Siri, fine. I shouldn't say that name because now my devices are going off. Hey, look at that. Can they web search with, you know, "Who is?" Can they use explicit language? Let's say "Not Allow." Math results, this is probably going to be a thing right when they get to school and they're using these devices. When I was growing up, you couldn't use a graphing calculator, you used a regular calculator, and now you can write notes, equations that solve them for you. So that's going to be something that has to be thought about at another time.
Privacy, "Share My Location." So I want to see the location of this kind of expensive device, so we're going to leave that as is. I'm not worried there, but we can go to the bottom section here. So do you want your child to be able to allow changes to the passcode and Face ID? I'm going to say "Not Allowed." But we're going to know the passcode, and we're not changing that. For the accounts, "Allowing Changes" prevents adding, removing, or modifying accounts. Passwords, we're not going to allow that. Shut it down. Sell your data. There isn't cellular data on this, but we'll just say "Don't Allow." And then speaker volume limit, drive, driving focus, TV provider. Some of this stuff I don't really need to worry about or it's not a concern in our household. But if these are things that you need to worry about, so for example, driving focus, that's probably a good thing if you know you have a teenager with an iPhone and you want to have a little bit more control there and use Focus mode. So those are other options that you can go to in the Screen Time area of the Settings app as well.
What I'll also make sure I have done is I'll go into the Family section of my Settings app. I'll click Calvin's name, and there's a section in here called "Ask to Buy," and I'll just make sure that is turned on. So that's what we talked about earlier, where I'm going to allow them to install apps, but once they do or they try to initiate it from the App Store, that is going to go to my wife and I to manually approve on our phone, be able to see the details of that app. So I don't have to worry about them getting something without our approval.
And then after I've set up all those parental controls, I'm going to go on his iPad and just make sure I kind of open all the apps for the first time, being that it's a fresh iPad, and just make sure that, you know, certain apps can use his location. So, for example, he loves looking at the weather. I don't want him to open it and click "No, Never Show My Location," and then we go somewhere and he's like, "Why can't I see the local weather?"
There's a lot of things where they could accidentally click that they don't want to see notifications. And what if it's, you know, with the Reminders app, and it's something that I'm sharing with them and I want him to get the alert? So go through all the stock Apple apps and just make sure that you're choosing the right settings, whether it's Fitness or News or whatever the case may be, just to make sure that they're going to have a good experience. Because I guarantee it, when they're kind of investigating a lot of these apps for the first time, they're just going to randomly mash whatever buttons are in front of them to get the notifications and the pop-ups away. So this is going to allow them again to just be able to use their iPad normally and have things function the way that you and Apple probably intended to have a good experience.
Oh, and let's not forget about that hack I told you about at the beginning of the video. If you've deleted an app you don't want your kids to have anymore, they can technically go to the App Store and redownload it. But here's a trick: Go on their iPad and click their picture in the top right corner and go to Apps. And if you go to their apps and you can see what is not on their iPad, find the app that you don't want them to have anymore and just pull to the left on that app and say "Hide."
Now, it's going to take it off that list. Yes, they'll still be able to find it in the App Store, but when they go to download it, instead of having the normal download system like they've already had the app and it's just putting it back on their device, it is actually going to make sure it goes all the way through the app approval process again to your phone or your iPad or your spouse's phone or iPad for that approval. So officially locking them out.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you set up an iPad with parental controls like a true parent boss. If you've liked the video, please give it a little likey. Subscribe if you want to see more content like this. Thanks for watching, and we'll see you on the next one.