The Verge’s Jennifer Pattison Tuohy is dubious about the new child safety work.
I think Pattison Tuohy had it right when she said, “Speaking of ‘a lot,’ managing screen time for your kids feels like a full-time job.” While watching the WWDC presentation, I kept thinking that the features were too complex, and that most parents would never use them.
The particular challenge with getting these kinds of controls “right” is finding a good way to balance between simplicity and granularity. For some people, anything involving more than a click or two is too much, while others want very fine-grained control. I’m certainly not criticizing those who aren’t comfortable going beyond a click or two, since a simple “click or two” carries with it an enormous number of hidden assumptions that can feel like they require a full-time job to understand.
I’m reminded of the vast complexity of Facebook’s ever-changing privacy controls. Facebook offers tremendous granularity, but almost zero confidence that anyone ever can get the controls set “correctly.”
The only way I’ve seen for control management to work is to offer a small number of reasonable presets for most people (perhaps three total options) while exposing granular settings for people with the time, experience, and knowledge to explore them.
Interesting article, but I think she gets to the heart of it right here:
Screen Time is simply not a reliable way to control your child’s device use; the only real way to limit screen time is to remove the screen.
Yes. Especially with stuff like this;
My daughter regularly hops onto my phone without me seeing and unchecks the Block at End of Limit toggle for each app.
I mean, come on. If you can’t keep control of your own phone, then Apple’s not going to be able to do it for you.
(I am reminded of my teen years and the lengths I went to sneak out of the house without my parents knowing).
Has any tech company managed to come up with effective child controls?
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