Any family with kids is faced with the pressure and decision on when or if they might give their kids a phone of some sort. And if so, what are the parameters around it? In this post, I’ll discuss the approach that we adopted for our daughter and shed some light on the choices we made.

Initial Goals and Desires

As a family with technical-ish parents, I knew that we’d have to cross the bridge of phones in the hands of our kids at some point. It came a little sooner than I’d anticipated when my daughter started going to youth group at church. It’s quite a bit less fashionable now for places to have phones for people to use and everyone is expected to bring their own. We decided we would go ahead and get her a device and use it as an opportunity for learning how to properly use a phone. After all, my wife and I had to learn phone responsibility as adults and we want our children to be prepared.

To begin, we didn’t just want to provide my daughter with a phone. As Christian parents, we wanted to set some parameters around this. And then, because we are both planners, we wanted to have a goal behind what we were doing.

• Initial Goals
  • Provide a device for our daughter to use to contact us.
  • Restrict usage to only needed functions.
  • Use her desired functions as a reward for proper use of needed functions.

With that in mind, we made up a bit of what we thought the needed functions should be along with what we assumed my daughter would desire. After all, this wasn’t her first experience on a device, just the first one that she would largely control on her own.

• Functions Needed (By Us)
  • She needs to be able to call and text a select group of people.
  • She needs to use a calendar to begin organizing her own time.
  • She needs a calculator available.
• Functions Desired (By Her)
  • She wants to play approved games.
  • She wants to draw on her phone.
  • She wants to capture and edit videos.
  • She wants to check the weather.

We decided that we would provide our daughter with the phone and she would need to prove to us that she could manage using the functions we needed her to perform in order to earn the privilege of using it for the functions she desired. I’m writing this article in retrospect by over a year and I can say that this strategy very much worked well for her. We set defined periods of time where we’d focus on one of our needs and help her through it and, if she could show us responsibility with it, she earned one of her items.

Initial Implementation

At the time that we decided to implement this plan, we were fully engrossed in the Apple ecosystem - iPhones, iPads, MacBooks, Apple Watches, and even Apple TVs. It only made sense for us to bring her into the fold. We felt like a new device was a potential waste of money. We weren’t certain that she could actually handle carrying the phone without breaking it and we didn’t want to waste that investment. A quick bit of looking around at the previous generation iPhones lead me to purchase the iPhone 12 from Swappa. I specifically chose that one because it supported 5G and had a flat screen (as opposed to the 11 which did not support 5G and had a curved screen - making a glass protector difficult).

The phone arrived soon enough and I got deep into exploring how we would configure it. I wasn’t going to just pass the phone to her and say good luck. No - I would configure it and test all of the parental controls. I wanted confidence that we knew what she was (and was not) able to get away with - at least on the surfaced. Apple’s Screen Time controls came to the rescue for this quite well. I was honestly shocked at how comprehensive the controls were. I could control almost any aspect of the phone. To add benefit, we could adjust her phone settings remotely by using Apple Family.

Specific Apple Configuration

To get into some specifics, we had a few things we ensured:

• We didn’t allow her to shop for or install any apps on her phone.
  • Honestly, I didn’t want to get nagged about things and I didn’t want her to even be able to watch previews for some of the games on the App Store.
  • If she wanted something, we would look for it together and then install it on her phone by overriding Screen Time with the lock code we had for it.
• We set time limits on most apps.
  • We could limit by app name or category. This was great because we could control how much time she spent playing games but, maybe even more importantly, how much time she could spend texting the approved contacts. This would become more important as we started to allow her to text trusted friends.
  • The time limits on the iPhone allowed her to ask us for more time via iMessage. We could approve it through iMessage also and we found this very convenient.
  • Some apps were always allowed when the phone was available - the phone, weather, and even her drawing apps as we didn’t want to curb her art purely due to time.
• We set downtime on the phone.
  • The phone was available from 9am to 9pm and would otherwise lock.
  • This was great for setting expectations on when she could use the device and made sure she couldn’t have it without our knowledge doing things.
  • This did prove slightly challenging when she was out on trips or at youth later than 9pm. However, because she could still call us, we were okay with it remaining in place.

Thoughts on Apple Parental Controls

Overall, the Apple setup worked great. I would highly recommend this configuration to other parents if this is your ecosystem. Although the controls within Screen Time are scattered about in maybe not the most intuitive way, they were very useful and gave us what we thought we needed.

One problem that we continually ran into with Screen Time controls with Apple was this odd “delay” - especially when transitioning from downtime. Sometimes the device would just fail to come out of downtime on time and would remain locked. Rebooting the device didn’t seem to help and this problem was worse if the device was low on free storage. We continue to see this occasionally on my son’s iPad - so it hasn’t resolved in any way.

Apple controls alone, however, are perhaps not the complete story as we would learn. Make sure you read to the end to learn about control features we didn’t know we needed.

Changing to Android - and Problems

As I’ve commented in some of my other articles, we made the switch from Apple to Android devices for a number of reasons - none of which were related to parental controls. We decided, however, that we would have to switch my daughter over with us in order to keep the parental control experience cohesive. Apple had spoiled us and we hoped for the same experience on Android. After all, I’ve found Google to typically be deeper from a technical perspective in the past.

My wife and I bought Samsung Galaxy S25U devices for our own phones. In order to make it easy to help our daughter, we decided we wanted her to use a Samsung Galaxy S25 as well. This decision, however, would prove challenging and I’ll expand on why.

Google Parental Controls

Within the current Android world, Family Link from Google is your option for family-oriented parental controls. It’s not the only option, for sure, but it is the one built into the phone and most similar to Apple’s Screen time. I actually found it very easy to configure (once I made sure my daughter had a child Google account) and within just a brief period, I had control over her phone. There were two things that I did not like about it, however:

1. Google has some misguided concept that, at the age of 13, my daughter she be allowed to opt-out of my parental controls.
   1. Absolutely not. That’s my decision, especially as the person not only owning the phone itself but also paying for the service. And why 13? Because of COPPA? I’m not really sure but I didn’t like it. I decided to just put my daughter’s age lower when I created her Google child account.
2. There is no way to control contacts, phone calls, or text messages through Family Link on a regular phone device.
   1. Say what? That seems like quite the oversight. Our AI overlords tried to convince me that it was possible and kept linking me to a page from Google that said it was possible. However, in reading the fine print, it was only available for Samsung Galaxy watches (uh, what?).

This left a hole in the parental control scheme. I checked around and found several solutions that also could not provide this control. It was looking pretty grim and I was pretty frustrated. I spent a week messing around with stuff between trying to make that feature (that didn’t exist) work and then trying out various parental control apps. Then, it happened - I found a solution that would work. More on that in just a minute.

Benefits of Family Link over Screen Time

Family Link is not without some really nice benefits over the Apple Screen Time approach as well. Having done both, I really prefer the Family Link approach now for a few reasons:

• I can leave Chrome enabled for my daughter’s phone and will then get prompted to permit websites for her.
  • This is immensely convenient for those in-app portal windows that need to show game content or sign-in screens. I just get a prompt while she’s doing that function and can whitelist the sign-on site easily. It was rather frustrating to have to “guess” these things with the Screen Time setup on Apple.
• I can lock my daughters phone at-will.
  • Yeah, this might sound evil but we use it for situations like completing a chore. The phone gets locked until the chore is completed and we’ve checked it. We absolutely love this feature as it takes the ownership off us to “patrol” and puts the ownership on her to complete and present to us.
• We set a rating for the content that she’s allowed to see on the Play Store.
  • This means she can find her own apps now and ask for permission to install them - but only those rated for Everyone. This has been far more convenient for us. I don’t recall that we could rate content on the Apple App Store at all - so this would not have worked there for us.

Dedicated Android Smart Devices

I want to pause for just a moment and let’s talk about a category of devices that I’ve heard about from others: these dedicated phones from third-party providers that are some flavor of Android device (typically Samsung) that have modified software for parental controls. The primary one that I heard about from others was Bark. To be honest, I have nothing against the Bark service but the actual phones offered by these services are maybe a bit low-end. Instead of an S25, we would have to go with something like a Samsung A15 and the device isn’t waterproof.

Overall and in my reading, the dedicated device route just didn’t fit. I also share a pool of data with my daughter (yes, I’m old-school) so I didn’t want to have her on a separate phone provider than me as some require. Also - my reading about these solutions had a lot of complaints about trying to configure the Bark Phone devices themselves. Additionally, what does having these modifications do to getting upgrades? Maybe nothing but it just felt like a headache I didn’t want.

Final Solution

I mentioned before my pause that I finally found a solution that would work. That solution was MMGuardian. They offer a fully software solution that I can use that also controls contacts, phone calls, and text messages. I was extatic to say the least. Now I could keep the phone I bought and all those benefits plus have the controls I needed. I quickly installed their software and started testing. Success! It was true!

Now, MMGuardian wasn’t without one glaring negative that I found: In order to manage texting, you must use their text messaging app on the child’s device. As you might have guessed, it doesn’t support RCS. This means that my daughter is limited to SMS/MMS only and that’s already caused her a little bit of a headache (especially coming from iMessage). This, however, is workable to me for the tradeoffs we get. The phone control works a bit different than Apple as well. Instead of defining and controlling her contacts, we defined approved phone numbers (which can come from contacts). This could be a little confusing for people coming from Apple (like my daughter) but was easy enough to explain.

Another “negative” is that I have to pay for MMGuardian. That’s right - it’s not free and that was mildly disappointing to me (not that I think it should be free - that Family Link has this feature gap). I chose to go with the Annual Subscription - Single Phone for $49.99/year to save the most money.

Finally, I don’t really like the overlap between MMGuardian and Family Link. They cross over in feature sets quite a bit but, to be honest, Family Link is far better at how it operates. MMGuardian is “clunky” in the way that it operates in my opinion and its is a bit rough around the edges from a UI perspective. In order to simplify the overlap for myself and my wife, I decided that we would do everything in Family Link that it supports and only use MMGuardian for the specific features we needed. So far, this has worked well.

Last Thoughts - Features We Weren’t Looking For

So I’ve talked all throughout this article on the things we knew we wanted. But, because we purchased MMGuardian, we learned a bit about some things we didn’t know we wanted but are glad we have now. MMGuardian specifically has features that allow us to introspect the content of things my daughter is doing. She’s not allowed to use social media yet but she still has discussions in her text messages. By chance, I just decided to enable some of the keyword filters on her text messaging and, after getting some alerts, I was thankful I did. It made an opportunity for a few conversations about some situations that came up that she was sharing with friends. My daughter is fully aware that we can see all of her text messages as part of the agreement to use the phone.

Additionally, MMGuardian actually inspects the images that my daughter sends and receives over text. It analyzes them and give us warnings based on levels about whether or not there is questionable content. I really have an appreciation for this. Hilariously, my daughter draws anime art and shares it with her friends. Although the art is perfectly safe from our perspective, MMGuardian believes the characters in the half-finished drawings are scantily clad and flags it as pornography. You can imagine our surprise the first time this happened!

Through the features we got from MMGuardian by default, we learned that we did need to take a more active role in monitoring what she’s doing without necessarily relying on us to remember it. It’s really easy to let things slip through the cracks and forget - but my daughter sends 400+ text messages a day. Each one of those conversations is an opportunity for us to help build her up and guide her to function in this world that isn’t our final home. I encourage you, if you’re in our position, to do the same.