A phone contract for kids: a template by age, and how to make it stick

A phone contract for kids is a written agreement between parent and child covering hours, places, which apps are allowed and what happens when the deal breaks. Done properly it is not something imposed on them: it is a conversation you both sign. Below is a template you can copy, adapted by age, plus the part almost nobody explains — how to get each clause kept without policing the house.

Mother and children reading and talking in the living room while agreeing family rules

What a phone contract for kids should cover

A good contract is not a list of bans. It is a clear agreement about how the phone enters your house, what you expect of your child, and what they can expect of you. The more of it you settle together, the more of it survives. Seven blocks that should never be missing.

Hours. When yes and when no. No phone in class, none during homework, none at meals, and none after a set time in the evening. Name the actual time — put away at 9.30pm on school nights — rather than leaving it as “not too late”. Vague hours are the first ones to go.

Places. Where the phone lives. The one that matters most: out of the bedroom overnight. It charges in the kitchen or the hallway, not on the bedside table. This is the clause that protects sleep more than any other, and the one that collapses fastest if there is no fixed charging spot.

Apps and social media. What is allowed at their age, and what gets downloaded only with a yes from you. One thing worth knowing before you write this clause: every mainstream social platform sets its own minimum age at 13, so an account before that is already outside the platform's terms and gets set up by lying about a birthday. Write the age line down and you will avoid half the arguments about it later.

Respect and privacy. The phone is not a rule-free zone. No sharing other people's photos or details without asking, decent treatment in group chats, no joining in when a chat turns on somebody. And in the other direction: you respect their space too, and you do not read their conversations behind their back.

Responsibility. Look after the device — it is not a disposable toy — and speak up without fear if something odd shows up: content that unsettles them, a stranger messaging them, a message they do not understand. Make it explicit that telling you never brings a punishment. That single line is worth more than the rest of the contract put together.

Consequences. What happens when the agreement breaks. They need to be proportionate, agreed in advance and consistent, not a different punishment each time depending on your mood that evening. When a consequence is reasonable and already known, it stops being a drama and becomes admin.

Review. A contract with an expiry date. What works for an eleven-year-old is insulting to a fourteen-year-old. Set a review every three or six months to widen the freedoms as they show they can handle them. That turns the contract into something that grows with them instead of a cage they resent.

Keep the template below. It is written to be copied as it is, changing only the rows that shift with age.

The phone contract for kids: template, ready to copy

This is the base version. Copy it, put their name on it, adjust the marked clauses for their age. The last column is the one that makes the difference and the one almost no template includes: how each clause is actually enforced, so it does not depend on you standing there.

Phone use agreement

Between __________ (parent) and __________ (child). Date: __________.

This phone is a tool we share. We use it with our heads on, and we go through this agreement again every __________ months.

Clause	What we agree	How it gets enforced
School and homework	No phone in school and none while I am studying.	Games and social apps blocked during those hours.
Meals	No phones at the table. Mine included.	Phones go in one fixed spot for the whole meal.
Night	The phone goes off and charges outside my room at __________.	A nightly session that blocks the apps at that hour, every day.
Apps and social media	No accounts of my own before 13. Downloads with permission.	We install and manage the social apps together.
Respect	I do not share other people's photos or details. I treat people well in chats.	We talk about it; if something goes wrong we look at it together.
Telling you, no punishment	If I see something odd, or a stranger messages me, I tell you.	Telling never brings a punishment. That is the deal.
Looking after it	I take care of the phone and do not lend it without asking.	Agreed consequence if the deal is broken.
Review	Freedoms widen as I show I can handle them.	We sit down every __________ months and update it.

Signed: __________ (parent) __________ (child).

How to adapt it by age:

9 to 11 (first phone, often a basic one): tight hours, no social accounts at all, a short list of apps chosen by you, phone always in a shared room. The contract itself is short and very concrete. At this age they are not negotiating a philosophy, they are learning where the phone lives.
11 to 13: a bit more room in games and messaging with friends, still no social accounts of their own since the platforms' own floor is 13, and the night clause stays non-negotiable. This is where the first real social responsibilities appear: group chats, someone being left out, a photo they were asked to forward.
13 to 16: they can have their own accounts now. The focus moves from “which apps” to “when and how”: study hours, protected sleep, a real conversation about privacy and what stays online. More autonomy in exchange for responsibility they have actually demonstrated, not promised.

Why a signed contract on its own is not enough

Here is the part most templates skip. You can write the perfect contract, sit down and sign it with all the goodwill in the world, stick it on the fridge. And a week later the phone is back in the bedroom overnight “just for a minute”, the apps open during homework, and you are the police officer repeating the same rule fifteen times a day.

It is not that your child is a cheat. It is that the phone is built to hold them, and a piece of paper does not compete with that design.

A contract sets the agreement, and the agreement is the valuable bit: you talked, you settled it, everyone knows where the lines are. But an agreement needs something holding it up when you are not in the room. Otherwise it becomes wet paper and a fresh source of arguments, which is worse than never having written it.

The American Academy of Pediatrics makes the same point with its Family Media Plan, a free tool that walks families through agreeing rules together rather than handing them down. The conversation is essential. But the conversation needs a mechanism behind it, or every night it comes down to a teenager's willpower and your patience. One of those runs out first, and it is usually yours.

It is also worth knowing which clause goes first, because it is almost never the one parents brace for. Respect and privacy tend to hold, because they are about people and children understand people. What goes is the night. Someone messages at 10.40pm, the reply takes four seconds, and four seconds later there is a feed open in a dark room. Nobody decided to break the contract. The contract simply was not present at the moment the decision got made.

The hours clause and the apps clause are the two that get broken first, because they are the two that collide head-on with what the phone wants from your child. They are also, conveniently, the two easiest to back with a physical barrier.

Making the hours and apps clauses keep themselves

The gap between agreeing that the apps go off at 9.30 and the apps actually going off at 9.30.

This is where Monk comes in. It does not replace the contract or the conversation. It backs them. You set the rules, that is the contract. An object holds them up, that is Monk. The difference is between “we agreed the apps go off at half nine” and the apps going off at half nine without you walking into their room to say it again.

Monk is a physical tag, the size of an AirTag, with no battery, that blocks the apps you choose on an iPhone. The part that matters for a contract: you can block the apps on your child's phone remotely, and to open them again someone has to tap the Monk — the one you keep. It does not come off by restarting the phone, or changing the clock, or switching to a Focus mode, or knowing a passcode. There is no soft unlock: no ignore-for-today button, no code to negotiate over. The app holds three emergency unlocks for the day something real happens, and they are finite. Short of those, you tap the Monk or the app stays shut.

So “no social apps during homework” or “nothing after half nine” stops depending on whether you are watching. You schedule the session once and it runs itself, every day, in the same silence. Calls and messages keep working the whole time, in case they need to reach you, and it works with no signal. Being straight about it: on iOS there is no such thing as a 100% unbreakable block — Safari is still there — but what Monk kills is the automatic reach for the app without thinking, and that automatic reach is where the hours really go.

And there is one more thing, which is where a contract wins in the long run. Given time, your child starts doing it themselves. They Monk to revise, they Monk to sleep, they Monk to sit with friends without a phone in their hand. Once the gesture is a habit, hunting for the back door stops being the interesting game, and the contract stops needing a supervisor. Confiscating a phone works for one afternoon. Learning to put it down on purpose works for the rest of their life.

How Monk fits into your contract, in three steps:

You choose the apps together that go dark during the windows in your contract: school, homework, night. Let them help pick. It is their agreement, not your punishment, and the difference shows up in whether they defend it.
You schedule the sessions once and they run themselves, every day, without you remembering the rule fifteen times before dinner.
Unlocking is a physical act — tapping the Monk — on whatever terms you both agreed. Over the weeks the gesture becomes a habit and they make it theirs, Monking to study or to sleep without anyone asking.

That is the layer that turns the two hardest clauses, hours and apps, into something kept without a fight and without a police officer. The rest of the contract — respect, telling you without punishment, looking after the thing — rests on the conversation, where it belongs. The two together are what make an agreement last longer than a week.

If it is the adult phones in the house that keep breaking the meal clause, there is a companion piece to this one: the phone contract written for parents, ten clauses you sign in front of your child before you ask them to sign anything.

Frequently asked questions

What should a phone contract for kids include?

Seven blocks: hours (school, homework, meals, night), places (out of the bedroom overnight), which apps and accounts are allowed at their age, respect and privacy, responsibility plus a no-punishment promise for telling you things, agreed consequences, and a review date. The list matters less than the fact that you talked it through and signed it together, and that each point says how it actually gets enforced.

What age should you write a phone contract at?

From the first phone, whatever age that is. The earlier the rules exist, the more normal they feel and the fewer arguments they cause. With a basic phone or a child of nine to eleven, the contract is short and tightly drawn. From thirteen, when they can have their own social accounts under the platforms' own rules, the agreement shifts towards hours, sleep and privacy rather than which apps are permitted.

Is a phone contract worth it with a teenager?

Yes, if it is realistic and negotiated with them. No, if it is handed down. A teenager will respect an agreement they helped write and that trades autonomy for responsibility. What does not work is a contract signed and forgotten with nothing behind it. That is why the hours and apps clauses are worth backing with a physical barrier, so they do not turn into a fresh argument every night.

How do I enforce the hours clause without policing them?

By scheduling the apps to block themselves during those windows. With Monk you block the apps on your child's phone remotely and they only reopen by tapping the Monk you keep, so “off at half nine” happens without you going into their room. It does not come off by restarting the phone or changing the clock. You set the session once and it stops being a daily fight — and after a while the supervision stops being necessary, because the habit is theirs.

monk.

Sign the agreement, then let the clauses keep themselves

You have the template and you know which clauses will cost the most. Sign it with your child, because the conversation is the valuable part, then back the hours and apps clauses with a physical barrier that does not rely on your supervision or their willpower. You set the rules. Monk holds them up. And you stop being the police officer in your own house.

See how Monk works

iPhone, iOS 16.2+ · One payment, no subscription · Monk currently ships within Spain — join the list for the UK and the rest of the EU

And if you are still working out the rest of the rules, you will want the guide to setting up parental controls on an iPhone and the state of play on phone bans in schools.