Let’s face it. Phones and technology are a part of everyday life. Whether you send a friend a text, watch the news, or waste time on social media, all of this time could potentially add up to hours of mindless and wasteful activity staring at a screen, when you could be doing something much more productive. Now, with Apple’s newest update, Screen Time, you (or your parents) can restrict time spent on your phone. If your Apple device has iOS 12 or later, you are under the age of 18, and your parents have family sharing, then they can now have complete control of your phone.

Additionally, there is a password protection on the setting to initiate the screen time. Through what Apple calls “family sharing,” parents have free reign over their child’s devices. When you want to purchase an app, your parents have to approve of it before it will download on the phone. This becomes a bit of a hassle when I am at school, or somewhere without my mom, who controls my phone, and need to get an app.

Word on Apple’s newest update has slowly spread among families, including my own. Now, my siblings and I all have restrictions on our phones. Luckily for me, since I am older, I have fewer restrictions than my siblings do, which my parents justify based on their belief that my younger siblings have less self-control.

Personally, I am given a time allotment for each day on social media (Instagram, Snapchat, Tik Tok, etc), Disney Plus, and Netflix, and when that time is up I have to request more time. This is what Apple calls “App Limits.”

If the time limit is not used up, all apps lock me out at 11:00 pm and let me back in at 6:00 am the next day. Parents can set the parameters by which they want their children to be off their devices. This is what Apple calls “Downtime.” My siblings get locked out at 10:00, and their apps don’t reopen until 7:00 am.

However, my parents exclude apps they consider “necessities,” like iMessage, iPhone, Facetime, my family calendar app, clock, and music. Apple calls this “Always Allowed.”

My parents can also view our screen time or the amount of time we have spent on our phones. This also includes how many times we have picked up our phones, when we spend the most time on our phones, and how much time we spend on each app.  The last limit on screen time is communication limits, which control who you can talk to during downtime. If my parents could see that I was on FaceTime with a friend all night, they could temporarily block their contact every night during my downtime.

One of the other restrictions Apple has created regards content, not regarding how often you are on your phone but rather what you do on your phone. I have these restrictions on my phone as well. I have certain websites that are randomly blocked for reasons I do not understand. I will be asked to look up a website in class, and it will be blocked. I am not allowed to listen to any music that has the E for explicit, all Youtube and Google searches are monitored and filtered, and I am not allowed to buy or rent any movie/TV show past PG-13.

In all, Apple’s Screen Time has brought down my family’s average screen time by a significant amount. Of course, I am not especially happy that my screen time is limited, but I have to admit that there are benefits. It makes me put my phone down and go to bed earlier, and I focus more on my schoolwork. It helps with my self-control. As screen addiction is a growing problem among young people, I think this is a good move by Apple.

Yet as I grow older, I feel that I should be able to be more independent.  Screen Time can therefore feel a bit overbearing. As I get older and closer to college and stay out later on the weekends, it can get annoying when I cannot access my phone because my parents are not with me. Even if I wanted to post something, my phone will be shut off.

Apple probably knew that users were starting to get addicted to their devices, and to their credit they acknowledged that it was partly their responsibility to fix. But for teenagers, it cuts both ways. Parents always want their children to grow into independent, functioning, and responsible human beings, but they also want to make sure their kids don’t develop unhealthy or dangerous habits. For those of us who are old enough to accept more responsibility, there should be some type of reasonable compromise so that we can trust our parents and they, in return, can learn to trust us.