I can’t believe I have to write this, but parental controls like Apple’s Screen Time are still incomplete, ill-informed, and immature solutions that don’t do everything they need to do. I’m going to pick on Screen Time since it’s what I use, and my family is mostly in the Apple ecosystem (my son has an Android phone he uses just for playing around – he is too young to have a phone – but he does use it for little things.)
Bad Assumptions
The core of it, in my estimation, is this. Computing is essential to our lives in 2020 and will be beyond. It’s important to properly educate and support both kids and parents as we navigate this. My son needs a different set of access at age 10 than he will need at age 16, and age 13, and age 21. I am under no expectation nor illusion that a tool like Screen Time should just magically do everything; I’m not abdicating parental responsibility. What I am saying is this.
The internet has gotten incredibly complex in the past 10 years, and none of the tools out there reflect this reality.
Example 1: Apple Music
When I joined Apple Music, part of the rationale was for convenience – it was, at the time, the only music streaming service that integrated with Siri. Later, we upgraded to a family account. My son does love to listen to music, but some of the music he’s heard elsewhere isn’t… great. This happens. This is normal! And so when we discuss a particular song, I may want to choose to block an individual song altogether. I can not. There is no way to do it. Apple Music allows for blocking explicit content, which is a start, but songs can still be about explicit topics even though they’re not using explicit words.
The simple Clean/Explicit block is a start, but Apple – like Spotify – should empower parents and guardians to make their own decisions for their own families. Apple does not. As a result, we have to severely restrict how the kiddo listens to music. It’s not ideal.
Also, the Android version of Apple Music? Doesn’t support Screen Time even if you’re signed in to a managed account. Restrictions must be set locally, on the device. Guh?
Example 2: Safari “Allowed Sites”
Screen Time allows one to set a level of permission for websites. You can choose to block everything and permit individual sites by hand, you can allow everything, or you can use something in the middle that blocks “adult” websites (not defined in the UI) and then block/allow specific ones on top of it. Great.
Allowing only permitted sites is primitive. It broke when I wanted to allow the kiddo to browse our library’s site for audiobooks to download and listen to on our family Mac: every link led to a different site, and as a consequence, I had to allow each site. This is an example where macOS and Screen Time assume we’re on the web of 2000, not 2020. This is more complex now, and the tool makes dumb assumptions. In the end, I just let him use Chrome for audiobooks – which, by the way, has no restrictions in Screen Time because it’s not Safari! – and obviously monitor what he’s doing.
Is it the job of the OS?
A natural question on this might be, well, should the OS handle this at all? It’s valid. But it’s also an implementation detail. We do have Circle installed on our Netgear Orbi network, and it’s helpful for completely blocking or allowing device access, but its filtering isn’t reliable.
Worse though, as a parent why would I ever need to delve into freaking network settings for this? Again, it’s 2020 – the barrier of entry to the internet is not as high as it was 20 years ago and yet, these tools are straight outta the past.
A better path forward
Here’s the thing. There’s an opportunity here for software and hardware to create a system that supports parents’ goals. My wife and I want my son to be safe and smart online, and we want him to have excellent digital hygiene. None of the tools out there actually support that, which means screen time is always a push-pull. All of these problems are byproducts of: the way the internet has grown and changed into a few major companies control of streaming entertainment, the de-geekifying of computing, and the way our culture has embraced all of this. And what do we have? Ways to block that kinda work, mostly don’t, and don’t support a strategy of good growth for our kids.