Screen Time shows "Ignore Limit" on child's iPhone

I’m also experiencing this problem. When my daughter’s friends began getting iPhones three years ago, I held out, waiting for Apple to provide strong, reliable parental controls. After the release of IOS 12, with all its touted parental controls, I finally gave in and bought her an iPhone. I spent hours watching tutorials and testing all the screen time features. I set it up a time limits applied to all apps and categories, toggled on block at end of limit, and created a screen time password.

Initially I was impressed, and the screen time limits worked properly for several weeks. But then last week something changed. Now when my daughter’s screen time limit is reached, she is asked if she wants to ignore the limit. (Well of course she wants to ignore the limit, she’s a child. If children could limit themselves, then we wouldn’t need parental controls in the first place!)

At first I thought she had somehow found a way to circumvent the controls. But I’ve now tested the phone for several days myself. Repeatedly I’ve powered down and restarted the phone, updated the IOS, removed and then reinstated all the screen time settings, uninstalled and reinstalled the apps — nothing works. Or, to be more specific, theblimits work for a day or two, but then for no apparent reason it starts prompting her to ignore the limit.

Between the time when the screen time block worked and when it stoped working, the phone has been in my possession the whole time, no new apps were installed, no changes were made in the settings, and the phone didn’t leave my strong password protected home WIFI. Nothing on my end changed and yet the parental controls went from working to not working. Anf the only way to know the limits have stopped working is to manually check her phone after the time limit has been ignored and exceeded.

So I now have to constantly monitor my daughter’s phone and physically remove it when her time limit is met — which is precisely the reason I didn’t want her to have a phone without parental controls in the first place. I would much rather she have no phone at all than to have an expensive iPhone that provides the illusion of parental controls that fail to function.