How to Set Up Screen Time and Parental Controls on macOS

Screen Time provides both usage-tracking and enforceable limits on macOS — usable for a managed child’s account or for your own account if you want real, hard-to-bypass discipline around specific apps or total usage.

Step 1: open Screen Time settings

 → System Settings → Screen Time

Step 2: review current usage before setting any limits

Screen Time → App & Website Activity

Seeing actual usage data first — which apps, how much time, at what times of day — makes the limits you set in the following steps meaningfully informed rather than arbitrary guesses.

Step 3: set a daily app limit for a specific category

Screen Time → App Limits → Add Limit →
  select a category (e.g., Games, Social) → set a time limit

Limits apply per-category by default, covering every app within that category collectively — useful when the goal is “less time on social media generally,” not just one specific app.

Step 4: set content and privacy restrictions

Screen Time → Content & Privacy Restrictions → turn on

This is where actual content filtering lives — restricting explicit content, app installation/deletion, and specific privacy-sensitive settings (like disabling the ability to change the Screen Time settings themselves without a passcode).

Step 5: set a Screen Time passcode distinct from the account password

Content & Privacy Restrictions → Use Screen Time Passcode

This passcode is what actually prevents the limits from being trivially removed — without it, anyone with the account password can simply turn restrictions off.

Step 6: schedule Downtime for specific hours

Screen Time → Downtime → schedule (e.g., 9pm–7am)

During Downtime, only apps explicitly marked as “Always Allowed” remain accessible — useful for enforcing a genuine break from most apps overnight, rather than relying on willpower alone.

System Settings → [your name] → Family Sharing →
  add a family member → their Screen Time settings become
  manageable from your own device

Screen Time for a child’s account is meaningfully more useful when managed remotely through Family Sharing, rather than requiring physical access to their device to adjust settings.

Step 8: review the weekly Screen Time report

Screen Time → App & Website Activity → view by week

The generated report breaks down usage by category and app over time — useful both for a managed account and for your own honest self-assessment of where time actually goes.

Why a separate Screen Time passcode is the step that actually matters

Every limit configured in the earlier steps is trivially removable by anyone who knows it exists and has the account password — unless a distinct Screen Time passcode is set specifically. For parental controls in particular, skipping this step means the “restrictions” are really just a suggestion a reasonably curious child can undo in under a minute.

Step 9: allowing specific apps or people to bypass limits with explicit approval

Screen Time → App Limits or Communication Limits →
  enable "Ask For Screen Time" prompts

Rather than a hard, non-negotiable cutoff, Screen Time supports a request-and-approve flow: when a managed account hits a configured limit, it can present an “Ask For More Time” request that the managing parent’s device receives and can approve or deny remotely, rather than requiring the parent to be physically present with the Screen Time passcode at the exact moment a legitimate exception is warranted (a limit hit during genuinely necessary schoolwork, for instance). This middle ground between a completely rigid limit and no limit at all is often the more practical real-world setup for a family actually living with these restrictions day to day, rather than a stance of pure enforcement that produces its own friction when a limit genuinely needs a one-off exception.

Step 10: setting communication and contact limits specifically

Screen Time → Communication Limits →
  configure who a managed account can contact, and during
  which hours

Separately from app-category time limits, Screen Time can restrict who a managed account is allowed to message or call entirely, and further restrict that during Downtime hours specifically — a genuinely different control from app time limits, aimed at who someone can reach rather than how long they spend in a given app, and one worth configuring deliberately rather than assuming app limits alone cover every relevant concern for a child’s device.

Why Screen Time works meaningfully differently for your own account versus a managed one

Applying Screen Time limits to your own account, rather than a Family Sharing-managed child’s account, changes the underlying trust model entirely — you already know your own device passcode and could, in principle, simply turn off any restriction you set for yourself at will. The value in this self-imposed case comes specifically from the deliberate friction of the passcode step and app-switching interruption, not from a technically unbypassable barrier the way it functions for a managed child’s account where the parent alone holds the passcode — worth setting realistic expectations about which of these two genuinely different enforcement models actually applies to your specific use case before relying on it.

Related:

Sources: