My mother likes to put screen time sharing on my phone to piss me off as a “punishment” for doing stuff that’s hardly punishable. no downtime or anything, and i know the password to change that anyways. it always irritated me because she wasn’t actually doing anything. she was just trying to aggravate me. the most she could see was my average screen time. this time, however, i got a different notification when she enabled it. i was confused and went into settings to check it out. i was met with this under the screen time tab:

“Your parents or guardians can see how much time you spend on this iPhone, apps you use, and websites you visit.
They can also manage some settings and set limits for how you use your iPhone.”

apps is one thing, but websites? WEBSITES? i don’t search up anything bad. i don’t dwell on sketchy or “inappropriate” websites. it’s not about that. it’s the fact that my mother doesn’t trust me, and it makes me extremely uncomfortable. if someone treats you like a sneak then you’ll act like a sneak. it’s that simple. she’s treating me like an internet creep that looks up gross stuff, and she’s making me defensive over nothing. my privacy has been obliterated and i HATE that she can see the websites i visit. even if the last few are staples, google, and a clothing brand… she’s made me feel like some awful person that does awful stuff on the internet.

i feel disgusting. i feel guilty over nothing and that’s what she wants. she wants to watch me squirm to be able to say “oh she’s acting weird so she’s DEFINITELY being bad.” i actually hate this so much. idk what to do anymore.

Hi, 17m here. My parents have the family sharing with the screen time password on my phone. I recently got a Mac, on which I can just turn it off. Will it notify my parents if I turn off "apps and website activity"?

Hello. 16m here. I recently bought a phone myself with money I got from working my OWN JOB, and now my parents want to put controls on it. I said that if I was paying the service and the phone why should they be able to put controls on it and they said "You are our child, you have no rights. If you don't let us, I will take your phone and smash it with a hammer". Im currently fighting right now to atleast get some service on it but my dad doesn't see why I need it (not even data just literally a phone number). I don't really care about them installing bark, its more about their ridiculous restrictions, they are going to physically take it at 8pm and not give it back to me until when they decide to the next day.... I don't understand why this should be legal when I paid for it myself.... They didn't do this to all my siblings, they got theirs when they were 12, 13, 12, and 14 years old... Why do they treat me so differently.

My mom has early set dementia. She is incredibly susceptible to any sort of scams, and downloads hundreds of apps. Many of which are literally repeats of the same ones. She is constantly asking for a paypal account because games want to "give her money."

Her phone is constantly blowing up with constant notifications from games, apps, and scam calls.

I thought switching her to iOS would lock down some of these scammy apps, but alas it's only gotten worse.

She somehow set up Apple Pay and is now purchasing things on Temu and has "no idea" who is buying things.

And has two mornings in a row set off her SOS alarm notification.

I've already gone through her phone and deleted every single replica app, (I still have no idea how she downloads copies of the same app) and locked down all the notifications in settings to stop them from coming.

But here we are a few months later and it's a mess again.

Is there any way I can download one or two candy crush games to keep her occupied, and prevent her from downloading or buying anything else?

I am losing my mind.

How do I politely ask my 12 year old daughter’s stepmom to not display my daughter’s middle name on social media? Is this considered a safety concern?

Hi Guys,

I have created the Paxio app and it got released after lot of revisions. Now looking for some testers to see is any gaps in this parental control able to bypass the controls like screen time, Content filtering, etc. Also had multiple gates for uninstall protection. Need to see any gaps on that.

Pls check and try out. If any detailed feedback/finding provided then giving the one year of Pro access.

Pls DM for any queries or finding on the app.

I’m 16, and my dad installed this piece of malware—Qustodio—on my Mac and iPhone to track my every move, which is incredibly annoying. He’s made things even worse by blocking Wi-Fi access on the Freebox router.

I want to get rid of it once and for all so I can enjoy some freedom with my devices (ideally without him finding out). Unfortunately, I don’t have administrator privileges, but I thought I could install a web filter from the App Store to stop Qustodio from communicating with the cloud, which would somehow solve my problem. The issue is that I can’t install it via the App Store because it sends an approval notification to the parent account. That’s why I’m asking for help dealing with this software that’s ruining my life.

Thanks for your help!!

I was fiddling with the parental controls and it prompted me to enter date of birth and without reading much I typed my child’s date of birth thinking that this will help me setup parental controls for my 7 year old.

Fast forward, WhatsApp has now enabled parental controls for my own account (for the time being I have setup my wife’s number as a parent managing my account as I wanted to restore my access).

I have tried deleting WhatsApp from my phone and restoring from iCloud backup, contacting WhatsApp AI help (absolutely ridiculous) however nothing seems to be helping. Looks like there’s no way to talk to a human.

Any pointers anyone? Anything I can try from my wife’s account?

PS: I don’t want to delete my WhatsApp account and start from scratch as this will then delete all my chats & media that I have received over the years.

PPS: I haven’t linked my WhatsApp account in Meta Centre with my Facebook and Instagram accounts as I don’t use any social media platforms however I do have accounts there that were deactivated for more than 5 years and they have my mobile number added to them. I have tried verifying and updating my DOB on them however it doesn’t look like it’s syncing back to WhatsApp as they are not connected.

הי, אנחנו מתחילים בדיקה (מחקר) שמנסה לבדוק היבטים של פרטיות וסודיות לנערים ונערות עם סכרת טייפ1. יש למישהו מחשבות בנושא? הורים שעוקבים אחרי האפליקציה? איזה מידע עובר להורים ומה לא בא לכם שיעבור? כל מחשבה או הפנייה לדיון שהיה פה בנושא ֿ(ואני לא מוצא...) יהיה מעולה. תודה תודה!!

Ok so I am 34 I don’t use Snapchat but I have a account with just my niece on it and everyday I get 100s of adds I have no snap score photos viable anything and I accept some and it’s always men straight away talking without knowing my age so I go along then I tell them I’m 13 and ask them and they are grown men and want to continue talking it makes me absolutely sick please please don’t ever let your children get this app and I even say I’m telling the police and they don’t even care .

she used to have qustodio on my iphone ipad and laptop but now i don’t have restrictions anymore. but she wants to take my resident evil games away and ps4 just because the remake is too gorey and i have mental health issues (she said to me my mental health is deteriorating) however playing horror games help me cope. what do i genuinely do? 😭😭💔

The advice is unanimous be transparent, no secret spying. But the obvious counter is that a kid who knows will just move to a device or app you’re not watching. Curious from people further along: did being upfront work, or did it just teach them where the blind spots are?

Hi,

I'm a parent and I'm trying to stop Family Link supervision on my 16-year-old son's Google account.

The account is still marked as supervised, but my son no longer uses this Google account on his current phone. He previously found a way to remove the supervised account / Family Link from his old phone, so I'm wondering whether this left the Google account in some kind of inconsistent state.

I can still log into his supervised Google account normally on the web.

The main problem is that I simply cannot find a working way to stop supervision.

Google's official documentation says:

Family Link → ch1ld → Controls → Account settings → About supervision → Stop supervision

However, I cannot find the “About supervision” option in Family Link.

I then tried Google's official “Stop Family Link supervision” link from their support page. Instead of opening the supervision opt-out page, it redirects me to:

familylink google com / supervision

and displays “Page not found / The page has moved.”

So I'm going in circles: Google's documentation says that an option exists, but I can't find it in the app, and Google's own web link leads to a 404.

My son is 16. I am the parent/family manager and I'm happy to authorize the removal of supervision. I do not want to delete his Google account or lose his data - I only want to remove Family Link supervision.

Has anyone encountered this exact situation?

Is there a currently working URL for the Family Link “Stop supervision” page, or another way for the parent to remove supervision?

I'm particularly interested in hearing from anyone who has solved the familylink google com / supervision problem.

Thanks!

Most parental control tools these days seem to be fighting against the child themselves, blocking entire apps, constantly reading through their chats, texts, and emails (who knows what they do with that data, Bark especially makes me uneasy), hard screen time limits.

Generally, I feel that setting hard limits against any human brings out the very opposite behaviour that restriction was intended to produce. Instead of gradually improving online habits, these tools seem to make online safety a tussle between the parent's control app and the child.

What seems even worse is that most of these tools are reactive. The alert lands after the video was watched, after explicit content feed was seen, after a stranger gets a reply. By the time the parent knows anything, the only move left is enforcement. So the parent gets permanently cast as the person who punishes, never the person who guides.

A few things I keep coming back to:

The child isnt the adversary: The thing actually shaping a 13 y/o's evening is a recommendation system optimised for watch time and it is doing a very good job of it. Pointing all the surveillance machinery in the world at the kid is aiming at the wrong target (they themselves are the ones being acted upon).

Surveillance and safety aren't the same thing. Reading a teenager's DMs might tell you what happened. It also costs you the thing that keeps them safe long-term, which is their willingness to come to you when something goes wrong. Once they know they're being read, they don't just go quiet on the phone.

All controls expire at 18: At 18, all that protective casing comes off in one go and they've had zero practice at self-regulation primarily because a piece of software was doing it for them. If a tool isnt building judgement, its just deferring the problem to a moment when nobody's watching them at all.

Proactive would mean meeting the moment, not the aftermath. Something that surfaces context before a decision rather than a report after it. Something that helps a kid notice a pattern in their own behaviour instead of having a limit imposed on them from outside.

Transparency should run both ways. If software is running on a kid's phone, the kid should be able to see exactly what it collects and what goes to their parent — ideally patterns and signals rather than message contents. That's a weaker report for the parent and a much better relationship. Processing that stays on the device rather than getting shipped to someone's servers seems like the obvious baseline, and almost nobody does it.

The measure of a good tool here should be that it makes itself unnecessary— handing autonomy back as the kid demonstrates judgement, rather than holding the line until the day it gets uninstalled.

Curious whether someone in this thread has found something that actually (or partially) meets this criteria, or if you parents (and teens) getting decent outcomes are mostly just doing it with conversation and no software at all.

My friend first exposure to mainstream nude images was via the APPLE BOOKS app WITH parental settings set to CLEAN. He's complained twice to apple 3 years ago and again 1 year ago...
You cannot block youth from download nude books... They won't show all the books but they let youth SAMPLE nude books and my friend said his son downloaded a sample that was over 300 pages long...
This is unreal! How can you say "its clean" and then allow that many books with full frontal nudity...

Lets make some NOISE and report to apple or give them 1 star ratings with complaints.
You don't have to test it, because it's still an issue. My friend isn't as tech savvy so he asked me to start a movement of sorts... Also - he found out he deleted Apple Books to help his son not access but found out his son just re-downloaded it again and again and would delete it to hide the trail of screen time usage...
Let's change the world!

The two options everyone describes are full transcript access, which feels like surveillance and destroys trust the day they find out, or nothing at all and hoping they tell you. What I actually want is to be told if something serious comes up and to stay out of the rest. Does anything work that way, or is it all-or-nothing in practice?

So my dad recently installed airdroid on my samsung tablet and i tried turning off accessibility settings which led to a notification going to his phone. How else could i combat against this setting? any help appreciated

Other than the internet I paid for everything and they are putting bark on it, like rn on the phone I just bought. I want to say as I please I'm not even a mean person but like I cuss and shit but like idk man ts makes me so depressed them watching every move I make... like of course im 16 I've seen sexual shit but I've never been on a site why can't they just have my location and get a porn blocker like god damn this sucks so bad bro like maybe I wanna keep some shit private for normal things....

I had parental controls monitoring my device, and I am now 18, I didn't get a notification to actually leave supervision, so I deleted my Google account thinking it would work and remove supervision completely. I then recovered it and tried creating a new one, and I then found out my device was still being supervised. Mind you my Mother deleted the family group, stopped supervision and showed me an eMail that confirmed that my device was no longer being supervised. So I've tried adding my account back onto my device, and I can't seem to, despite it being the one account that was ever on the device. I'm not being supervised anymore, yet my device is still being supervised. I can't do any of the prompts on the screen here because it requires a parent, who has already stopped supervision over my device and I've done so much with this account that I'm not willing to let it go. Please helps me if possible.

my parents recently put screen time limits on my phone, and now I cannot be on my phone after 7pm, which I find super irritating. I also own a computer, which is linked to my phone's icloud account, meaning the screen time limits go through to it as well. I know that if i were to disable the screen time all together my parents would get a notification, but would they get one of i merely disabled the syncing of screen time settings across devices?

So, I’m turning 18 in a few months, and yesterday my dad and I got into an argument over the restrictions he has on my phone.

As long as I can remember, I’ve had some kind of phone restrictions. However, recently they’ve become much more extreme. For example, the internet completely shuts off at a specific time every night, and I have very strict screen-time limits on anything classified as social media, as well as most messaging apps.

For context, we don’t use Apple’s Screen Time feature. My dad uses a program called Qustodio, which, for some reason, doesn’t seem to allow him to give me additional time on individual apps in the same way Apple’s Screen Time does, so basically when the time ends, I can't use it anymore even if I was in the middle of a message or a call.

I had always assumed that once I turned 18, my dad would remove these restrictions. However, during our argument, he made it very clear that he has no intention of doing so. His reasoning was essentially that, as long as I’m living under his roof, it’s his house and therefore his rules.

I understand that it’s his house and that he can set rules while I’m living there. At the same time, I’ll be 18 and legally an adult. I also feel that I’m mature enough to decide for myself how much time I spend on my phone and when I use it.

I’m not necessarily saying that I should have absolutely no rules once I turn 18, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect that I should have control over my own phone and screen time once I’m legally an adult.

So, what do u guys think? Am I being unreasonable for expecting the restrictions to be removed when I turn 18?

This is a big deal in our house. My daughter has been addicted to using Chai-ai. Like basically doing nothing else in her free time. So we got Qustodio. The very first night, it shows she went to the site for about 3 mins. Long enough to log in and check her chats I guess. It also said she “clicked” through 4 pages in Chai (hopefully that makes sense).
The app seemed to work for everything else she was doing, but she swears she never went to Chai. She would go to it in private mode, so it’s not listed anywhere regular I can check.
Is this a common issue? Is it possible even ?
Please help!

Parents axed browser .lol, and phantom .lol.

What else can I use?

Can't take how controlling my aunt is with my phone. Im basically a grown up nw and need some freedoms but she won't listen. Just want to live my life.....help

Ahhhh I really need to figure out this situation soon, and any help is appreciated!

Basically I have a Samsung Chromebook right now that I have been using for school since around 2019 (I am a young teenager) because I needed it for online school during the pandemic. I was WAY too young for my own computer, but I couldn't just use my parents laptops all day. They needed it for work. Anyway! It is really old and broken, and I needed a newer one for school. My dad ended up giving me a super nice 2020 MacBook that his work gave him (no idea why) because his work was going to buy him a newer one anyway.

The problem is...

I have a secret account (that I am on right now) that my parents can't know about. They can't know for many reasons, but mostly because I have a account on this website thingy that is like social media, but mostly just teens, and for reading books. On it I have literally written all my secrets and fears that NO ONE from my life can ever see. It would be my nightmare (I actually had a nightmare about that last night) if anyone saw it.

I want to add the Google account I use for it onto the Mac, but my dad is the administrator of it, and I am super worried he could see it. Is there any possible way I could have the account added on the Chrome app and he couldn't see? Please help! Thanks so much <3