Parental controls your child can see

Do you need an app at all

Start with what the phone already does. Google's Family Link is free, made by the company that makes Android, and for a child under 13 it handles a surprising amount: app approval before installs, a daily screen time limit, a bedtime lock, a current location on a map and content filters for Google Play. If your worry is a nine-year-old installing twelve games a week and playing them until midnight, set up Family Link first and live with it for a fortnight. You may find you are done. Samsung phones add their own Digital Wellbeing controls, and a Pixel's Digital Wellbeing screen will show a child their own usage without any parent involved at all.

Where the built-in tools run out is specific, and it is worth being able to name the gap before you fill it. Family Link shows a current location but no history, no saved places and no arrival alerts, so "did she get to school?" still means opening a map. It has no idea which apps are new since Tuesday beyond the ones it was asked to approve, no web filtering that follows the phone onto mobile data, no calls or texts overview, nothing about notification timing on social apps, and no way to tell you that the phone has quietly stopped reporting because battery optimisation switched itself back on. Its supervision also loosens sharply at 13, when a child can choose to leave. If none of those gaps is your worry, you do not need us yet.

Be equally clear about what no app fills. Nothing on the market tells you whether your child was with the phone, who they were with, or what was said in an end-to-end encrypted chat, and anything claiming otherwise should make you more worried about the app than about your child. The feature that would let you read messages does not exist here, and the social media monitoring hub says so on every per-app page before it says anything else.

What to agree with your child

The conversation is the product, and the app is the thing that makes the conversation specific. Have it before the install, not during, and have it with the phone on the table rather than in the abstract. Three things need agreeing. First, what will be shared: say the list out loud, feature by feature, and say the never list too, because "I will never be able to read your messages, and here is the screen on your phone that proves it" changes the temperature of the whole discussion. Second, who will look and how often: Priya told Amara she opens the panel most evenings and gets a message when Amara arrives at school, and that she is not going to sit watching the map. Third, what happens when a rule is crossed: a paused app is a paused app, not a punishment, and a keyword alert is a reason to ask a question, not evidence.

Let your child choose some of it. Which places get saved is the easiest thing to hand over: a child who picked Swim Club and Grandma Ngozi's argues about the radius, not about the app. Let them read the consent screen on their phone at their own pace before they tap Continue, and let them open "What's shared" whenever they like. The families who get a year out of a parental control are the ones where the child could explain the rules to a friend.

Agree one more thing: that this is for a child, on a phone the child uses, with the child knowing. The terms of service say it in legal language, but it belongs in the kitchen too. Tracking a partner, a housemate or an adult relative who has not asked is not what this is for, and depending on where you live it may be against the law.

The two or three features to start with

Turn on fewer things than you want to. A newly paired child starts with no limits at all: nothing is blocked and nothing pauses until a parent sets something, and that default is deliberate. For most families the first fortnight needs three features, and only three. Save two or three places, usually Home and school, with an arrival alert on the school and nothing on the friend's house. Leave screen time recording but unlimited, so that you have a normal week to look at before you decide what a limit should be. And open the device health page once a day for the first week, because about three in four "it stopped working" cases are a phone that put the app back to sleep, and the amber line names the setting and the exact path to fix it.

For a child under 11, add app blocking with approval for new installs, so that the twelve-games-a-week problem is handled at the moment of installing rather than afterwards. For a child of 13 or so, add web filtering with three categories blocked and safe search locked, and leave social apps alone for now; what you will learn from the notification counts in week two is more useful once you have a baseline. Keyword alerts are a week-two feature at the earliest, and when you do add them keep the list to about twenty words. A long list makes noise, and noise gets muted.

Resist the rest. Bedtime schedules, per-app limits, tasks and rewards, and the calls and texts overview are all useful, and all of them are better set with a week of real data behind them. The screen time page has a day-by-day plan for the first fortnight that starts with no limit on purpose.

What to do in week one

Pair on a weekend afternoon with both devices on the table and twenty minutes clear, not on a school night at nine. Go through the six permissions together, one at a time, saying what each one powers: Location for the map, usage access for screen time, notification access for keyword alerts and social counts, accessibility for the block screens, battery optimisation off so the phone keeps checking in, and device admin so that removing the app takes deliberate steps and sends you a tamper alert. Declining any one only switches off that feature, so if your child balks at one of them, let it go for now and come back to it in a week.

Then do very little. Open the Today page each evening and read the summary. Notice the pattern of the arrival alerts: the first few days of "Amara arrived at Oakridge School · 08:49" feel like news and by Thursday they feel like weather, which is what they should feel like. Look at the screen time rings without acting on them. Look at app activity on Friday and see which three apps are the week, because it is nearly always three. If the health line goes amber, fix it together on the child's phone with the "fix together" prompt rather than from across the room.

Ask your child to open "What's shared" on day three and tell you what it says. If their list and your panel match, the arrangement is working. If they say something you did not expect, you have found a misunderstanding early, while it is still cheap. Make a note of any alert that interrupted you and did not need to, and move that alert type to the daily summary; the family dashboard page explains what the Today view surfaces and why. At the end of the week, with seven days of a normal week recorded, decide on the first screen time budget, and tell your child the number before it appears on their phone.

When to loosen it

A parental control that is never loosened is a parental control that will be removed, either by the child or by a parent tired of arguing about it. Build the loosening in from the start, and do it out loud. A reasonable rhythm is a review every school term: open the rules together, look at what fired, and remove one thing. The early-departure rule on school can go once a child has been walking home alone for a term without incident. The arrival alert on Home can go once it has become weather. Per-app limits can turn into a single daily budget, and a daily budget can turn into a conversation about what the child thinks it should be, which at 14 or 15 is usually a tighter number than the parent would have picked.

Some things loosen by age and some by trust, and they are not the same. Web filtering for adult content is an age thing: there is no term in which a 13-year-old has earned gambling sites. The friend's house, the map, the notification counts on social apps are trust things, and they should come off as trust is shown, one at a time, with the child told why. Multiple children on one account make this easier rather than harder, because Amara at 13 can visibly have fewer rules than Noah at 9, and the difference is the clearest promise you can make a nine-year-old about what 13 will look like.

The end state is worth naming. For most families, by 16 the app is either a location share the child agreed to keep and a bedtime they asked for, or it is gone. Both are success. Uninstalling the child app stops collection immediately, deleting a child removes their history, and closing the account removes everything, and we would rather you reached that point by design than by a row. If you get there and want to tell us what you would have changed, the contact page is read by people who write these pages.