The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has official screen time recommendations for kids of different ages – but parents still have to grapple with the trade-offs and practicalities.
One parent has shared her own struggles with finding the right balance, and the exceptions she allows to her normally-strict policy …
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Apple’s Screen Time tools need some work. Not counting serious bugs that go unfixed far too long, one of Screen Time’s major drawbacks is that any limits you set can be easily bypassed. Ultimately, your desire to make healthier technology choices still comes down to sheer willpower when an app time limit is reached.
Roots is like Screen Time on steroids, providing a similar set of tools but with some core features that can help new habits actually stick.
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Mark Gurman reported over the weekend that customizing iOS app icons will be one of the new features we can expect to see in iOS 18.
On the face of it, that seems a relatively minor cosmetic change, but I think it does open the door to using it in rather an impactful way …
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A new survey of both parents and teens explores how families navigate the issues of smartphone usage, with some of the results more surprising than others.
Chief among the unsurprising findings is that around 40% of families have repeated arguments about how much time teens spend on their phones …
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Last month I wrote about two features that I consider missing from Apple’s Screen Time parental controls. In retrospect, what I should have written is how Screen Time is broken. I thought the next software update would fix things.
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A new study says that more than seven hours a day of daily screen time is harmful to our health, and the cost of this to the US economy adds up to $73B a year.
Eye-strain, muscle fatigue, neck pain, sleep interference, and even damage to our musculoskeletal system can result from spending too much time in front of a screen, says the report …
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Have kids with iPhones and iPads? As a parent, it’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with Apple’s Screen Time feature. These parental controls can be found in the Settings app under the Screen Time section on iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
Screen Time parent controls are very configurable and you can set individual rules for each child. However, I’ve recently bumped up against two Screen Time limitations that should be on Apple’s radar.
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Apple introduced a clever new Screen Distance feature in iOS 17 and iPadOS 17. iPhones and iPads with Face ID are now able to notify you when you may be using the device too close to your eyes. The idea is to detect and prevent eye strain for everyone while lowering the risk of nearsightedness in kids. But what if the feature is actually disrupting how you use your device?
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Family Sharing lets parents limit Screen Time for kids, but in China, the government is proposing to impose tough limits by law …
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Many parents are reporting that Screen Time is broken, with restrictions silently canceling on devices in their Family Sharing group without alerting them.
This is a problem previously reported, but which Apple claimed to have fixed in iOS 16.5. The company now admits that the problem persists even into the latest public beta of iOS 17 …
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A one-hour daily TikTok screen time limit will be set by default for users below 18 years of age, says the company. The move coincides with the White House setting a 30-day deadline for federal employees to remove the app from government devices …
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Apple is expanding its Screen Time software that gives parents more control of their family’s devices with a highly requested feature: the ability to manage kids’ texts, phone calls, FaceTime calls, and even contacts on iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. Read on for how to set it all up in iOS 13.3 and later…
A new Screen Time feature arriving with iOS 13 is Communication Limits which lets parents select what contacts their kids can talk, text, and FaceTime with. Read on for how iPhone Communication Limits work in iOS 13.
In the run-up to WWDC, Apple is coming under pressure from developers of parental control apps to announce an official screen time API at the event. The 17 developers say they were encouraged to apply pressure by ‘father of the iPod’ Tony Fadell.
Apple has been accused of deliberately blocking apps which compete with its own Screen Time feature, removing or crippling other parental control apps …
Apple has now made an official statement confirming an earlier report that it had removed or restricted the majority of popular third-party screen time and parental control apps from the App Store.
The company did, however, deny that it was anything to do with competition with its own Screen Time app …
Last week, 9to5Mac reported that Screen Time, and many other iOS features, are coming to the Mac this year. Following our report, designer Jacob Grozian has imagined what Screen Time might look like on the Mac when macOS 10.15 is released this year.
Screen Time was one of the headline features of iOS 12, intended to help us monitor the amount of time we spend using our iPhones, and to set limits for ourselves. The latest 12.2 beta allows even greater control. But reducing screen time, and other approaches to so-called digital detoxing, don’t seem to be very effective …
Digital 2019, a new report from Hootsuite and We Are Social, shows that the average person spends more than a quarter of their lives online …
One of the headline features of iOS 12 was Screen Time, a way to track the amount of time we spend using our devices. But researchers say that understanding screen time is not just about the hours, but how we spend that time.
How much of the time is positive? How much is harmful? Getting answers to those questions requires something both tricky and controversial …
Apple released the first beta of iOS 12.2 earlier this week and we’ve already highlighted a lot of new features. One small but useful feature that hasn’t yet been widely noted is more granular control of Screen Time’s Downtime feature.
Screen Time was one of the key features in iOS 12, and it does seem like something Apple is committed to as a focus of iOS going forward. Kids love their iOS devices, so it makes sense for Apple to continue to enhance ways to help parents going forward.
We recently learned that Apple has been cracking down on third-party apps that provide parental controls, so it got me thinking about how Screen Time could be enhanced to give parents greater control with iOS. Here are some ideas I came up with for Screen Time upgrades in iOS 13. If you have any more, please leave them in the comments.
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With iOS 12, Apple launched a new Screen Time functionality for monitoring device and app usage. As part of that, TechCrunch reports today that Apple is cracking down on third-party screen time trackers in the App Store with stricter reviews and in several cases, removal from the App Store.
The average American looks at their phone 52 times a day, up from 47 times last year. That’s one of the findings from the Deloitte 2018 Global Mobile Consumer Survey …
