Why does it seem like many parents are unaware that a hand me down iPhone can be heavily locked down with screen time settings? A list of things you can do:

- allowed list of apps, can reduce it to just phone, imessage, and utilities like weather app

- effectively permanent downtime, just set the end time less than start time such as 3:00 am to 2:59 am (technically 1 minute of non downtime). This blocks apps except for the allowed apps

- disable installing apps from app store

- disable adding new contacts and block calls and messages not in contact list. This allows parent to control who the phone can be used to contact

- none of these settings can be changed without the screen time pin

- also configure the phone with a minor apple account and add to your family group so you can monitor and control screen time settings from your phone.

So start with a super locked down phone that can only be used to communicate with parents. This is very helpful when they start after school sports. And the phone is so locked down they don't really have any interest in it.

Later when they're older start allowing communication with friends from school. But still only phone and imessage, no other apps. This reinforces that it's a communication device, not for endless scrolling and watching videos.

All of this is work, more work, admin work, things I would pay an assistant to do. Why would I want to be a system administrator when I can just not give my children systems that I need to administer?

This type of solution provides a simple system that requires very little administration and supervision. The problem with modern communications tech as it relates to children is that by default these systems provide access to every adult on planet earth to your child's inbox. That is not a feature that I need, but rather is a crippling design flaw much more likely to harm my kids than it is to help them.

Same exact reason 90% of people don’t use the Shortcuts app. This stuff is obvious for you and me, but tedious and painful for everyone else, and it’s still easy to miss one thing that leaves it easy to circumvent. There are people whose full time job is managing MDM in IT departments, and it’s not just because of the number of devices they manage. It’s because this stuff is complicated. And that’s for grownups, whose judgment is expected to be better than 12-year-olds, and who can be fired.

Also Screen Time is a little better in a few ways than what Android offers, but it’s still a joke, is incredibly Byzantine, and limits your options as a parent.

Because it’s a lot easier to refuse to buy an expensive gadget for your kids than to refuse to press a few buttons to set them free.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Best (for older kids) would be a dumb cell phone like we had in the 2000s. Good for phone calls, texting, and simple offline apps like casual games, camera and music player. Maybe email. Definitely no web browser, youtube, or social media crap.

I don't know the extent to which such devices are still manufactured today.

Parents are aware. This is a horrible solution.

What's going to happen immediately is that kids with equivalent phones will compare, realize that one has a lot of restrictions and the other doesn't, and it becomes a nightmare. They know that all you need to do is unlock it for them.

It's the same mental distinction between "For $200 we'll install rear seat warmers in your Tesla" and "For $200 we'll 'unlock' the already-present rear seat warmers" (that's the only hardware unlock I've ever paid for and I'm still bitter 7 years later).

I don’t think people are buying this fun novelty landline phone because they haven’t heard of parental controls

I mean, a landline + phone is way cheaper to be fair

For some people like me, iOS parental controls are utterly and completely broken. I have tried to make it work over three or four years and just as many iOS releases - no dice.

About a dozen times in those years, the system silently failed open either completely or partially (eg. some restrictions still applied, but whitelists in Safari were no longer enforced, the app store was suddenly accessible again or time limits were no longer in place). Not once was there any indication on the parent device.

Several times, the only way to reenable broken restrictions was to wipe the device, because changes to parental controls simply stopped syncing.

Here's long-time Mac developer and blogger Michael Tsai describing the same thing: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/09/24/screen-time-brokenness/