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After being inspired by a story, I decided to try setting up parental controls on my smartphone. I had been using Android's Digital Wellbeing already to limit my screen time in the apps that you're designed to get lost into. It was helping a bit, but I took it a step further with Google's Family Link. It was bit of a pain to set up at first, but after getting through the few bugs in the setup process, it seems to be working fine. I made a new Google account for the purpose of controlling the one signed in on my phone. You can set up time limits per app, always available apps, downtime and content restrictions. I set up limits per app at first to lock the apps that were problematic to me before I've lost hours to them in a day. Sadly those didn't work. For some reason the timers didn't reset overnight and they stayed locked the next day. I changed to use just the overall screen time which means all the apps that aren't set to always available will lock when the screen time runs out. Because I of course need to adult with my phone, I set the messaging apps, e-banking and such to always available. I didn't set up all that many content restrictions, because adulting. If I had someone in charge of them, I would want to try them during a play day. The downtime locks the phone entirely for a set time, but you should be able to make calls or receive them. I scheduled that for sleeping. There's also many possibilities for enforcing a power dynamic. The content restrictions I mentioned. You could set them so the user has to request their caregiver to approve any app installation. You can set age limits for the apps the user can install. The user can request more screen time when they run out. The caregiver can block the use of an installed app entirely or manually lock the phone. They can force the user to request permission every time they try to sing into a device with their Google account. If the user only has Chrome browser installed, it's possible to filter which websites they can access and enforce SafeSearch on Google. However, you can't see the websites the user has visited or their search history, which is a positive thing in my opinion. The caregiver can turn on restricted mode on YouTube, which turns off the comments and stops the user from watching age restricted videos. There's location sharing as well, although many people already have another method to check where their loved ones are in case of an emergency. The caregiver can have the app send them notifications when the phone leaves an assigned location. I'll detail my settings below for the more curious ones, but I have to say the parental controls on my phone and scheduling offline time to my other devices from my router have helped me stick to a bedtime a whole lot better. I know I can turn them off at any time. I have an old tablet that I use just to adjust the settings in the Family Link app, although it's also possible in a browser on PC. However, it's just enough more effort to go add more screen time or change the downtime schedule that I don't do it. Doing it would also give a greater feeling of failure than browsing Instagram without limits late into the night would. I also love the slight feeling it gives me, the feeling of not being trusted to use a phone without limits, even when I'm enforcing it myself. I should mention that I'm a student, so I often have weeks without or with very few lectures and I'm supposed to schedule my work myself. Hence the issues with sticking to bedtimes. There are some risks as always with technology. I haven't memorized the password of the account in charge of the parental controls. It's a generated password in a password manager. When my phone locks for downtime I can't access the password manager app, so if I'm out and about at night without a secondary device, I'll be locked out of my phone. It means I need to remember to change the downtime schedule or turn it off for nights like that. The app has also had some bugs, but nothing serious yet. There's the small chance of a bug locking me out. The risk of someone hijacking the Google account is quite low. I have a strong password and two-factor authentication on it and I don't use the account for anything else. There are the privacy concerns with Google, but I want to think they're somewhat worried about getting fined for not following the general data protection regulation (GDPR). Feel free to educate me on how naïve I am. Has anyone else set up parental controls for their devices or does someone even have a caregiver in charge of them? My settings Screen time: 1 h 30 min on weekdays, 3 h on weekends Downtime: 23:00-6:00 on nights before weekdays, 23:59-07:00 Friday-Saturday and Saturday-Sunday.* Content restrictions: Play Store: PEGI 12 limit *I will probably move the downtime to start sooner on weekdays as I get used to it.