Aging Out of Screen Time Family Sharing

TidBITS Talk
1

I created an AppleID Family consisting on me, my wife, and our daughter who is now 15 years old.

As a result, Screen Time on my iPhone allows me to to control the the Screen Time settings on our daughter’s iPhone. Moreover, Screen Time settings that I make on her iPhone can’t be changed without entering a 4-digit Screen Time Passcode so she can’t change settings I’ve made.

I think that at some point I won’t be able to change Screen Time settings on her iPhone this way. I think that once she attains some particular age based on the birthday in her AppleID, Apple will consider her an adult for the purposes of Family Sharing and will therefore take away my ability as her parent to remotely control her Screen Time settings.

Does anyone know whether it’s true that Family Sharing based Screen Time is restricted to a particular age range?

I seem to recall that my daughter will age out of Family Sharing child status at 16. But I can’t find anything about aging out of AppleID child status anywhere on the internet.

Does anyone know at what age Family Sharing considers a child to crossover to being an independent person for the purposes of Screen Time?

Please post only technical replies. Please do not respond with comments about whether using using Screen Time this way is appropriate parenting. I’m just soliciting technical facts about an iOS feature.

Thank you for reading

2

This seems like an obvious question for Screen Time, which should be addressed in the documentation. I had a look, but sadly, the docs seem very ambiguous to me.

The Leave Family Sharing document says:

Any family member aged 13 or over* can remove themselves from a family group. If you have Screen Time turned on for your account, the family organiser must remove you.

The * refers to the Family Sharing and Apple ID for your child document:

* Age varies by country or region. Under 14 in Austria, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Italy, Lithuania and Spain. Under 15 in Czech Republic, France and Greece. Under 16 in Brazil, Croatia, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Kosovo, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Singapore, Slovakia and Slovenia. Under 13 in all other countries.

Looking at just that first sentence I quoted in the first document, I’d guess that when a person reaches the regionally determined age, they could remove themselves from the group, presumably rendering themselves independent and therefore free of any Screen Time restrictions.

But the second sentence changes the meaning for the Screen Time context. One way of reading it is “only the family organiser can remove people with Screen Time from a family group, whatever their age”. But I’m not certain of that interpretation.

Hopefully you’ll get some useful thoughts from others here. If not, perhaps this is something to try and nail down with Apple Support - given that much of the implementation here involves server side stuff and opaque syncing to devices, finding the truth through experimentation could be difficult.

3

Thank you for your reply.

I called Apple Support.

I was told that in the United States, a child ages out of parental controls via Screen Time Family Sharing at 18.

See also
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252862847

2 Likes