How to set up parental controls on an iPhone: the full walkthrough for your child's phone

Let's do this properly instead of halfway. Most guides walk you through the menus, tell you you're covered and send you on your way. You're not entirely covered, and I'd rather say so now than after you've stopped checking. So: first we set up Apple's parental controls the way they actually hold. Then I'll show you where a determined kid slips through, and what you can put on top so that particular gap closes.

No judgement, no rush. Fifteen minutes of setup buys back a lot of arguments. Let's go.

How to set up parental controls on an iPhone, step by step

Apple's parental controls live under Screen Time and they cost nothing. You can run them from your child's phone or from your own, and Family Sharing is what lets you do it without holding theirs. These are the steps, in order.

1. Set up Family Sharing. Open Settings, tap your name at the top, then Family. Add your child's account, or create a child Apple Account for them right there. This links their device to yours so you can change their settings remotely. If your child is still signed in with your Apple Account, this is the moment to give them their own.
2. Open Screen Time. Settings, then Screen Time. With Family Sharing on, your children appear under Family; tap the one you want to manage. You'll see usage reports broken down by app and by day. That alone tells you more than a week of guessing where the evening went.
3. Set a Screen Time passcode, and make it a different one. This is the step nobody explains properly and the one that decides everything else. Under Lock Screen Time Settings, iOS asks you for a four-digit passcode. Do not use the code they type to unlock the phone. If your child knows that code, and they usually do, they can walk into Settings and undo the whole thing in about two taps. Pick something they don't know. Don't leave it written down somewhere obvious.
4. Turn on Content & Privacy Restrictions. Inside Screen Time, open Content & Privacy Restrictions and switch it on. This is where the real decisions sit: whether they can install or delete apps, whether they can buy anything, what they can watch, listen to and browse by age rating, and what the phone is allowed to share. Give web content and in-app purchases an extra minute each. That's where the surprises come from.
5. Add App Limits and Downtime. Still in Screen Time. App Limits puts a daily cap on a category (social, games, whatever is eating the afternoon) or on a single app. Downtime schedules the hours when the phone goes quiet for everything you haven't waved through: overnight, homework, dinner. Calls and anything under Always Allowed keep working. While you're in there, Communication Limits decides who they can reach during allowed time and during downtime.

That gives you a free, built-in and genuinely useful setup. Apple keeps the current screens documented in case a menu gets renamed in a future update: Use parental controls on your child's iPhone or iPad.

Can a child get around iPhone parental controls?

Yes. That's the part the tutorials leave out. Not to alarm you, just so you don't lean on it harder than it can take. Screen Time is software, and software that lives inside the phone you're trying to limit always leaves a seam somewhere. Three of them get used more than the rest.

The restart trick. Restart the iPhone, open the app that has hit its limit, and keep tapping "One more minute" each time the reminder shows up. Done patiently, the cap stops meaning anything. It isn't hacking. It's a fourteen-year-old with an evening free.

Moving the clock. Anything on a schedule, Downtime most of all, depends on what the phone thinks the time is. Change the date and time in Settings and some of those rules get confused. An old classic, and the reason Downtime alone is a soft rule.

Knowing your passcode. This is the big one. If your child knows the Screen Time passcode, they open Settings and switch the lot off. And plenty of them know it, because plenty of parents reuse the unlock code. That's why step three matters more than the four steps around it. With those four digits, anyone can dismantle every restriction in the house. The whole system comes down to a number standing between your child and TikTok, and a number gets guessed, watched over a shoulder, or negotiated for every night.

None of that makes Screen Time useless. It's excellent at reports, at age-appropriate content, at setting the frame everyone agrees on. It just has a ceiling as a hard barrier, and you should know where the ceiling is. If yours has already got past it more than once, that's a whole article of its own: what to do when your child gets around every parental control you set.

What Apple's parental controls cover, and what they don't

Side by side, here's what Screen Time does well and where it runs out of road.

So the summary is simple. Apple gives you a very good dashboard: what's happening, what's age-appropriate, what the ordinary weekday looks like. What it doesn't give you is something that holds once your child starts testing it. That's usually the part you came here for.

What Monk is, and how to bring it into the house

Monk is a physical device, designed in Spain, that puts something solid between a phone and the apps eating the evening. It works on iPhone only, iOS 16.2 and up. There is no Android version and it does not work on iPad, and we'd rather tell you that before you buy anything. It's a one-off purchase, no subscription, and the app is included.

Here's the part that surprises people: the plan doesn't start with your child's phone. It starts with yours.

1. Use it yourself first. Tap your own phone against it one afternoon, in front of them, and say nothing about it. Children don't copy instructions. They copy what they see. That's the setting no menu in iOS offers you.
2. Let them try it. One dinner with everyone's phones tapped out. One homework session with the usual apps closed. No speech attached — just a gesture, and then back to the potatoes.
3. Let it become theirs. They tap it to study. They tap it to sleep. Once the gesture belongs to them, hunting for the back door stops being the interesting game. The rule is held by an object instead of by an argument every night.

If what worries you most is doing this without reading their messages or tracking where they are, start here instead: phone rules at home without spy apps. And if you're still deciding when to hand over a phone at all, we've written about what age a child should get a phone.

Common questions