Screen time controls not working

This week it seemed like the screen time controls I had in place were not working as expected. The phone I provided to my son was supposed to limit his screen time to about 2.5 hours a day but it sure felt like he had gone over that limit.

I checked went to check what sort of time reporting I had for his phone and noticed that it seemed to show very little detail, in fact, it seemed to have stopped reporting anything in the past week.

I could see this by going to Settings -> Screen Time -> selecting his name and looking under the daily average. It showed the last update date as a week prior and a small circle was spinning as if to tell me it was trying to update.

The solution was to toggle the “Ask to Buy” option found under Settings -> My name (top of the screen) -> Family Sharing -> His name (under Family Members) -> Ask To Buy. Here disable the option, go back once, return and re-enable the option. Once enabled his phone immediately got a message saying that Screen time was enabled. I also saw an update on for his screen time usage. As expected on a few days it had gone past the 2.5-hour limit. Now that it is enabled we will see how well it works.

Family sharing disabled apple Face ID setup

I have recently provided my son with an iPhone and in the process enabled some of the typical parental controls. In addition during the setup, I skipped over the Face ID setup assuming it would be simple to complete later and it should be his face and not mine used for this feature.

FaceID & Passcode
Where did it go?

Anyway, later when trying to find the Face ID option it appeared to be missing. I could find the section for Face ID but nothing about setup or resetting this feature. The issue is based on if you allow your child the ability “Passcode Changes”. When this feature is disabled the menu item on your child’s phone for “FaceID and Passcode” will be removed.

So, on your phone go to Settings -> Screen Time -> Content & Privacy Restrictions -> Passcode Changes. Here select either Allow (FaceID and Passcode will show) or Don’t Allow (FaceID and Passcode will NOT show).

It is also worth noting that you can now have more than one FaceID assigned to the phone. So, I could have set up FaceID with my image to start with but I still would have had this issue later when he tried to add his own image to FaceID.