Monitor a child's iPhone
How to Monitor a Kids iPhone
It's possible for parents to monitor activity on their child's iPhone in a number of different ways.
If you're a parent who's trying to set up parental controls on your child's iPhone, you might be wondering how to monitor your child's activity. Ensuring that your child isn't accessing unwanted content is a very important part of setting up a full parental control system.
This problem can get even more complicated depending on how exactly you've decided to implement parental controls. This guide explains, from start to finish, how parents can monitor their child's iPhone and view:
- Web and Search activity from the Safari app
- App usage and screen time
- Location
Instead of paying for a parental control app from the App Store, it's possible to use Apple Family Sharing if both you and your child have iPhones. Apple Family Sharing is a built-in feature on most Apple devices, including iPhones, iPads, and even Mac computers.
What Kind of Activity Does Apple Family Collect?
Since Apple as a company has taken a strict stance on its user's privacy, Family Sharing does not record everything your child does. Instead, it gives you, the parent, a summary of some of the more important kinds of activity:
- Your child's app usage and screen time
- New app downloads and in-app purchases
- Websites visited in the Safari browser
- App notifications
Parents will see a summary like this for their child's activity for each day:
Website activity will also be listed in the same view. Here's another day that includes more website activity:
Unfortunately for parents, Apple does not allow you to view detailed information about your child's activity, like
- Specific pages browsed on a website; for example, parents can see the time their child has spent on Google, but won't see their child's search activity
- Specific content viewed by their child, like YouTube videos, posts viewed, or other social media activity
However, instead of providing detailed information, Apple does allow parents to set a wide range of restrictions for websites or apps.
Opening each app will provide a summary like this:
Parents can also view some basic information about websites visited by their children:
Set Up Apple Family To Monitor Your Child's iPhone Activity
This does require some coordination between you and your child, but depending on how you set up your child's Apple account, a parent can enable Managed Screen Time for their child.
Parents can set up parental controls so they can monitor their child's activity by following the instructions in our dedicated guide for iPhone parental controls .
Monitor Activity with Apple Family
To monitor activity remotely using Apple Family sharing, here's what will need to be set up:
Read our dedicated guide for parental controls on iPhones for full setup instructions.
Monitor Activity with Screen Time Only
There might be some cases where you can't use Apple Family, but if your child's iPhone has Screen Time, this can be set up to record their activity, similar to Apple Family. Parents will need to "borrow" their child's iPhone to view and make changes.
To monitor activity from your child's iPhone with Screen Time, here's what will need to be set up:
Each time you'd like to view your child's iPhone activity, you will need to have access to the physical device. It's strongly recommended that parents know both the iPhone passcode and their child's Screen Time passcode.
Optionally, parents can prevent their child from changing Passcode or Face ID settings:
Read our dedicated guide for parental controls on iPhones for full setup instructions.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can my child leave our Family Group?
This depends on the birthdate set on your child's account. If your child's Apple account thinks your child is below 13 years old, then your child cannot leave the Family Group until they age naturally.
This also means that they can't change their birthdate, which can be changed on teen or normal Apple accounts.
What activity can parents view about their child's app usage?
Parents can only see the total amount of time their child has spent on an app.
What's the difference between website and app activity?
Screen Time combines all Safari web browsing and app activity into one view.
Some platforms, such as YouTube, offer both a website and an app. In this case, the screen time activity you see as a parent is a combined total for both the website viewed in Safari and the app version of the platform.
Can parents see text messages or phone call activity?
No, although they can see or add Contacts for their child.