Parental Controls on Macs and iOS devices

TidBITS Talk
1

Josh and Community—

I am writing with a question for Josh and the community about Screen Time and Parental Controls.

I am posting in this thread because I vividly remember Josh’s “iPad and kids” article of 6 months ago. And I suspect that Josh’s observations may have influenced development of certain Screen Time functions.

My question: Is there any way to meld implementation of Parent Controls in MacOS 10.14 Mojave with Screen Time in iOS 12?

I have a 10 year old with an iPod and a MacBook. We’ve set up Screen Time on the iPod (which I can watch from my iPhone). We have set up Parental Controls on the MacBook (which I can administer from another Mac when at home).

It seems that I should be able to use my phone from work to give my son more time on his MacBook to finish homework. And it seems that time on my son’s iPod and MacBook should tally together rather than run separately, unaware of each other’s limit. It seems that I should be able to set one iteration of parental controls and have them apply to wherever my son’s AppleID is logged into any device. Am I missing something, or is this an instance where iOS and MacOS are not yet talking to each other?

Thanks in advance.

2

(Moved this to a new discussion.)

@tonya may know more, since she’s looked into this for articles recently, but my understanding is that the parental controls on the Mac haven’t really been touched in a long time. It would be nice if Apple would bring Screen Time to the Mac too, and thus integrate the platforms that way.

3

The parental controls with macOS Mojave appear to be unchanged from the previous controls in High Sierra - and quite a few iterations of macOS before that. And, there’s zero integration with the iOS parental controls. This is an area where Apple has a lot of opportunity to improve, as Chris’s question clearly demonstrates.