Screen Time not working after update

I’m having the same issue as well. I have 5 kids who were all set up on screen time controls. After the last eat update all settings were reset and each time I take the time to reset them to my preferences they go back to being undone. I can actually watch screen time turn back off as soon as I turn it on.

now all my kids are unprotected.

Interesting.

I have iPad Air 2, Macbook pro 2015 and new iPhone 12. For my personal account, screen time sharing across these 3 devices works just fine. However, I am using them as work tools, I do not need to monitor myself.

Then I have Macbook air, where I have got an administrator account and my child is another user account (child account) to whom I've set up family sharing etc.

Even this device reports OK within my pesonal account, typically 0s, since I am not using it.

But for the child account, who is in sensitive age, where I actually need the overview, screen time just shows blank field: "As this device is used, screen time will be reported here".

All devices are updated to latest available firmwares.

Tried to toggle with Screen Time On / Off on all devices, particularly on the problematic Macbook air. I have the impression it worked after that for a day or so, but then went again back to blank screen and no reporting.

I cannot intervene child's Macbook air every day asking my teenager for the access in order to toggle, reset or do whatever to get the screen time working. It is a sensitive thing, I do not want to be a policeman.

So, I need to say

• the screen time is not working where I need it most - to monitor teenager (family member screen time sharing)
• the screen time works fine where I do not need it as much - to monitor my own habits and activities (personal screen time sharing)

ScreenTime is COMPLETELY broken in macOS Big Sur 11.2. I have a brand new MacBook Pro, and, despite being a cloud computing architect with 30 years tech experience and a 15-year mac user, I can not get child controls to work on an account I have setup for my son. It's broken even when I turn OFF the controls. Here's some issues:

• Downtime is just a complete UI failure. I want to allow him to use his devices ONLY from noon - 1, and 5-8pm during the week, and from 9-8pm on weekends. i'd like to set durations for each program. I've just had to set this up in a Microsoft account, where I can define multiple allowed times per day when use is possible, but then limit the duration of specific programs individually. How can the Apple design be SO MUCH WORSE than what Microsoft was able to come up with, which is just intuitive and obvious? Having one downtime for each day, when the downtime crosses the midnight boundary, is just incredibly confusing. I have tried to <day> = 8:00pm to 5:00pm, to indicate only 5:00pm to 8:00pm on that day should be allowed, but this doesn't seem to work, and it's just completely non-intuitive.
• Safari and Chrome are not listed as apps. There really should be a way to jus say "Allow these completely during these times" or "disallow all use" or "allow but use per-website whitelist/blacklist." Instead, how to figure this out is jus completely confusing, and I'm a very technical guy.
• I'm here writing this, because I'm trying to use my son's account to setup an alternate user on GitHub to test some team logic pretending to be him, and just want to use multiple websites. But, I'm getting blocked, in both Safari and Chrome, even for a simple Google search. 1Password can't download. Some sites work and others don't. I can't figure out how to say "allow all sites, but just block these few". I have turned off Downtime, turned off App Limits, and then I go back to his mac account, and I STILL can't use Safari or Chrome, getting strange messages. It's just completely broken and unusable.
• I have seen this behavior before, where modern websites reference dozens of different internal links to work, including many calls out to trackers or ad systems which if denied just break the website and make it unusable. Any child protection system can't break every website anyone wants to use when it's turned on, or we will do what I've always had to do each time I've tried to use Apple's parental controls in the past - they are SO BUGGY in causing random things to break all over the place with no idea as to why, you just have to turn them completely off in order to use the account, then you're left with ZERO protection for your child!
• I love Apple. I use a MacBook daily and love it. But, their parental controls have always just SUCKED. How can Microsoft come up with a more usable variant of this - it's unreal. What I want is simple.
  • I want to define multiple times during the day when controls are in or not in effect. This needs to differ by day. For example, I currently want to allow use noon-1pm and 5pm-8pm on Mon, Wed, Fri, and 9am-8pm on Sat, Sun. I can do this on Microsoft, why not with ScreenTime?
  • I'd like to set duration limits on each Program or Website, so I can say "you can use this 2 hours within your 11 hour window today". For an App, that means it's open and running. For a Website, it means that website it open in a tab in any browser. Seriously, how hard is that?
  • if I turn on parental controls, I shouldn't have random features of the OS or other programs not related to those specifically banned just randomly break, because behind the scenes some firewall rules are blocking traffic which is needed for the service or website to work, but is not the primary app or website shown in the address bar, so I have no way to know why something isn't working (and then have no alternative often to just turning off all controls).
  • What I MOST want to do sounds pretty simple, and it should be equally as simple to configure, and it should work. Here it is: "I don't want my son to be able to watch youtube.com during school hours!" - I can take away his devices when he's asleep, but I can't watch over his shoulder when he's on a computer 24x7, as he's using it for school. So, it should THE PRIMARY USE CASE TESTED to simply disable a website in any browser, by just entering it's domain, and any child-domains should be included (i.e. "deny youtube.com", should mean "www.youtube.com", "other.youtube.com", etc).
  • I should be able to specify, for each specific item, if that is per-device or across all managed devices. So, I want "block *.youtube.com from 8-5 Mon-Fri - across all devices / accounts associated with this child", or "Allow <game> to be used 2 hours today on either mac or iPad or iPhone cumulatively, not 2 hours per device."

Doing simple and obvious things should not be so difficult, and cause so many unexpected side-effects which break MANY things that you can't really turn it on.

This should not be so hard.

More issues I forgot to mention on my last post. On my son's macOS account, where i enabled ScreenTime ONCE - even after turning it off, the account remains so broken as to be unusable, both when ScreenTime is off or on.

• Most Safari and Chrome websites are broken and unusable.
• I can't use email, against any account but his iCloud child account, which we don't use at all. He has both a school and personal account on two separate Google Suite setups, which require what I think is an OpenID configuration, so when email tries to authenticate to Google, so Google will trust the mail client, via a handoff to the browser, this just fails each time with a mysterious error. So, mail is unusable.
• Even when I go in and completely disable ScreenTime, turn off all ScreenTime options, everything remains broken, even if I log him out then back in. So, it's doing some type of destructive modification of user settings, which is breaking stuff everywhere.

I have a similar issue. For me, I am unable to see any usage on any of the devices I have ST enabled on (see image). I have filed numerous bug reports and have since heard nothing back. I hope this issue is fixed. It's been going on a while.

The same thing has been happening to me on my iPhone for what I now realize has been months. I have the iPhone 11 Pro software version 14.4 (up to date.) I assumed that it was still working and when it was stuck on “thinking “mode it was just a poor Internet connection . however I realized that it was not when my son spent nine hours on his iPad last Sunday after I just happened to check his device. Clearly there are other issues here, including him sneaking and using the device which we are addressing. I’ve tried everything including erasing and resetting my phone twice. It Does not work it just gets frozen on the screen thinking which currently means it is not syncing with my children’s phones, I I can’t see the screen time nor can I make adjustments to it. Both of their phones are updated as well. My husband has the XR and his screen time does work. Apple needs to fix this ASAP it is dangerous for children do you have unlimited access to the Internet, screen time, etc. with the zero ability for parents to control. I’m thinking about escalating this to some type of reporting agency outside of Apple. The public definitely needs to know there is currently no way to monitor your child on an Apple device

Setting up a screen time no longer works in downtime, you have to set up through App Limits which will give you control once again. My daughter IPad and phone was providing her access at 10PM instead of 7AM. Difference is you only can provide hours per time you would like all apps to shut down

Currently experiencing the same issue. Allowed apps don’t save as always allowed.

my screen stays stuck when. I press the screen time option in the settings section.

none of my specific settings are sticking.

my option to allow my daughter to install or delete app also doesn’t work.

i have many others I can’t name off the top of my head

TWO issues I see with screentime...

Since the update to 14.0.1, my child can access and change screentime setting like App Limits, Always Allowed Apps, and Content & Privacy Restrictions.

ALSO, setting up screentime resulted in wifi connectivity issues. Her phone was so slow to connect thru wifi, she always had it on cellular data connection. It seems that choosing Don't Allow on Location Services is causing this issue for us.

I'm having the same problem and have seen zero information. When my kids request more screen time, I can't access approval from the notification at all- it just goes black and crashes. I am able to get to it from the settings route, but it takes forever. I've tried turning phones off and back on and it still doesn't work.

One thing I have found to work although it might not be convenient, is managing your child’s phone via his or her device directly. On my daughters phone, which is the exact same model and year as mine (iPhone XR) I experience no issues. It’s only when I attempt to do it via my phone that all the settings I had in place delete. As well as the freezing and crashing. Hope apple has moms on their design team working on this. Lol.

Unfortunately I am experiencing the same issue. My child is using Macbook and an Android phone. So I am directly comparing Apple Screen Time with Google Family Link. Although I am using Family Link iPhone app, I must admit Google Family Link shows much more reliable performance and also data.

Yesterday, I restarted the Macbook and Screen time started working so I hoped I am back on track. High hopes, today is frozen again and not showing any usage data.

With child protection, Apple is pulling the short straw and should work on it.

Same here, for the iPhone7 of the boy it always randomly resets to nothing.

But for the iPhone XS of the girl it works without any problem.

The XS was setup before the 7.

Both have old iPads (idk which one exactly), the one of the boy doesn't support screen time (too old), the one of the girl does.

I have an iPhone 12 Pro Max and my girlfriend has a iPhone XS Max.

When we check the screen time settings for the boy, both iPhone show the same settings at the same time.

It doesn't matter on which device we configure the settings.

So I guess it's an issue on the iPhone of the boy or (if someone other can confirm, so we have another case) it's because of the old iPad.

Of course we do NOT share iCloud accounts, everyone has his/her own one and we use Family Sharing.

All devices are on the latest supported iOS/iPadOS version for their model.

I hope this gets resolved soon, right now it's a pita ...

Our screen time seems to be working fine. However out always allowed apps that i manually add aren’t working. My stepchild keeps asking like everyday for basic cameral/album app. It’s getting annoying. Hope they fix this ASAP.

Screen Time was working just fine on all devices until I updated DD's macbook air to Big Sur. Now, she can't use the internet, all Screen Time settings get frozen stuck on "Allow" or multiple "Allow" settings (adult content, explicit content, multiplayer, etc.). This is entirely unacceptable and dangerous. It needs to be fixed ASAP Apple!