Here’s what I would like:
- Discuss with my kids an appropriate budget of device usage. Maybe 1h a night on weekdays, and 3h a day on weekends.
- Have that budget apply automatically across all of their devices. iPad, iPhone, Windows, Mac, Playstation, etc.
- When they reach their budget, they can request a short extension, say 5min. Maybe this is a conversation, maybe this is a notification on my phone. Either way, I can approve it trivially.
- Based on various conditions and conversations with my kids, I can easily lower or increase their budget for the day, from my phone.
- We all get reports on usage of various devices and apps, trends, and we can look at it together, think about the time we’re spending on screens as a family, and be more deliberate about that time.
- Maybe in v2, more complex budgets, like laptop can be free-for-all at school during the school hours, without taking away from evening budget.
- Maybe in v3, we can get into specifics of what kind of apps have what budgets. Maybe. But maybe diminishing returns at this point.
- Of course this has to work whether devices are connected via wifi or cell or whatever.
There is no way to do this today. Even if you’re exclusively on Apple, there’s nothing close to this. Apple’s current parental controls are poor, although to their credit they’re better than the rest. That’s a roundabout way of saying that all of it sucks.
If I wanted to implement this in my copious free time, I don’t see any way to do it without dramatically intrusive client-side software, and even then I can’t control actually locking out a device when a screen budget has expired, especially on iOS.
Now, I just described what *I* want. Other parents may want something different. But the bottom line is, parents want and need more control. Ideally that control is wielded after open conversations with their kids. Ideally that control is wielded without super intrusive content filters and monitoring. But you know, *some* control that allows parents to spend less time fighting about screens.
This can’t happen without the platform makers agreeing on a Parental Control Protocol. That protocol would then allow parental control apps to emerge and offer different styles of parental control. The screentime-budget-app is one I’d gladly build. Other folks could build other apps with a different philosophy. Enrolling devices should be easy. OS-level support on those devices is required. Transparency to the user should be part of it, so a device displays that it’s enrolled in a parental-control system.
Maybe we need an industry consortium. Maybe we need some regulation once we have a reasonable protocol that all major platforms can adopt. But the status quo seems woefully inadequate, and given how modern platforms limit what app developers can do, this cannot be fixed without actual collaboration between the platform vendors.
I hope this happens.
Benlog 