Phones for the bairns

[NattyDread 2]

My eldest is starting High School in the summer and the time has come for us to relent and let her have a phone.
We've inherited a couple of iphones but I don't have much of a clue about them. I realise you need an i.d and stuff though.
 
Have any of you lot any tips about setting these things up for kids? I presume you can get parental controls with the sim provider but can you set their i.ds up to your own email address?  Anything else I should be doing from the start?

I imagine there's a few folk on here that have gone through the same palaver and I'd really appreciate any pointers.

Cheers

[The Guppy]

Make sure you make a new account for each kid. Don't do what my sister did and put both kids phones on her iCloud account. It just causes problems down the line when they're all getting each others messages.

Although I'm not sure if you can oversee child accounts if you don't have an iPhone yourself.

[greencalx]

If you're going down the iPhone path you can set up a family group, linking a kids account to your own. In fact if they're below a certain age (13 I think) you have to do it this way. You can set up an "ask to buy" feature which means any App Store purchases have to be approved by you. It's a bit clunky, but it works.

iOS has fairly comprehensive controls, called "Screen Time", which I've never used myself but could be worth looking into if you're worried about how it'll get used. For example, you can prevent Apps from being installed or deleted. The latter useful if you're thinking of putting any Big Brother stuff on there - I know a colleague who did this with their kids which was apparently quite effective at stopping them doing anything too awful. Not sure I'd go down that path myself but we're not at the phone stage yet.

The official Apple help pages are usually pretty good at explaining how to perform a certain task. E.g. https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/iphone/iph7f15d92dd/ios

Good luck!

[greencalx]

Make sure you make a new account for each kid. Don't do what my sister did and put both kids phones on her iCloud account. It just causes problems down the line when they're all getting each others messages.

Although I'm not sure if you can oversee child accounts if you don't have an iPhone yourself.

I think you can - you can access apple accounts at https://appleid.apple.com/

Edit: bollocks, you can view but not manage the family sharing settings there. But I think you can set up the Screen Time business directly on the child's device and then lock it with a passcode that's different to the one used to unlock the phone.

On the whole I've not found parental controls to be a particularly smooth ride, either being too restrictive or too permissive, and have mostly left them switched off.

[NattyDread 2]

This is all good to know. We really only want her to have one as we're out in the sticks and the school is a fair bit away. She's mentioned her pals all using Whats App so she'll definitely want that. I don't want to be too Big Brother about it and snoop on her or anything but it would be good to have some mild-ish controls on what sort of stuff she can access. I suppose with Whats App all bets might be off anyway. I've never even used that so no idea.

Thanks for the tips.

[greencalx]

Yeah I'm not keen on the big brother stuff. I think maybe one of the simplest things you can do is set the flag that prevents the child from changing the passcode lock, so you can always unlock it and take a look at it if you need to. The fact you can do that should act as sufficient deterrent to get up to no good.

Another thing to do is enable "Find my...". This lets you locate it, if it gets lost, and disable it remotely if lost or stolen. This you can do from iCloud.com on any web browser. Could also be handy if child claims it's lost to stop you looking at it... I'd probably use this approach over installing some horrible spying app.