How to Ground your Teen Without Actually Taking Away His iPhone

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today’s video, I’ll show you how I “take away” my kid’s phone without actually taking it away. 

Sometimes parenting can feel a bit like an operant conditioning experiment. You reinforce good behaviors with rewards and discourage bad behavior with punishments. The trick is figuring out what rewards and punishments work for your kid. My son does not have a ton of “levers” that work for conditioning his behavior. He doesn’t seem to be motivated by money, purchases, or curtailing activities. BUT there are 2 things that motivate him: his phone and socializing. I really try not to take away socializing since I feel like it is integral to being a teen and important for their identity development. So that leaves his phone as pretty much my only lever for molding behavior. 

This is problematic. First of all, if I take away his phone altogether, it also serves to cut his sole means of communicating with his friends — but also with me and his dad.  And let’s be honest, the older they get, the more important it is to have a way to communicate with them.  Plus, under no circumstances are his friends ever going to call the land line in our house to talk with him — that is just not going to happen. So, communication lines are just down until he gets his phone back. 

The second issue is that more and more, teachers in our school district expect kids to have phones in order to do their work at school.  I hate this, but have to acknowledge that without their phones, they are at a disadvantage at school in terms of accessing assignments and submitting them. 

So, one option is to allow him to have his phone at school and take it away once he gets home. Okay — this option is terrible for me. I’ve tried this before and it doesn’t work. It requires that I am home when he gets home AND that I remember to get his phone from him and lock it up.  Then, even if I remember to do this, he’s constantly asking me to have his phone back to submit assignments or contact his teachers and I have to remember to get it back after each one of these. Forget it.  I’m way too distracted to remember all of this and, as a result, his “grounding” just doesn’t happen. 

So, here’s how I solve this problem. Now when he “loses his phone” for bad behavior, it just means that most of the functionality on his phone is turned off.  He can text, email, take photos, use blackboard, google classroom and other school related apps, and (if I’m feeling nice) he can listen to music. He cannot browse the internet, use social media, watch videos, or play games.  So, how do I do this?  I use the 

iPhone Restrictions 

I did a similar video a while back on making your smart phone into dumb phone using Restrictions.  This uses the same concepts, but for the specific application of grounding your kid.  There are 3 steps:

• Deleting apps
• Setting restrictions
• Releasing Restrictions

Let’s go through each. First, 

Deleting apps

Take your kid’s phone and press on an app until they all start wiggling. Then press the Xs until you’ve deleted of all of the apps you want to take away.  You’ll notice that some of the apps don’t have an X for deletion, like the Safari browser.  We’ll take care of those later.  Remember, you don’t need to totally wipe the phone.  If he isn’t really using an app or it’s not there for entertainment, you can probably leave it.  I leave Google Maps, Photos, and a bunch of other tools. These are not “fun” apps, so it doesn’t matter whether they are on there or not. Here’s the way the phone looks once I’ve finished. Next, go into

Restrictions

If you haven’t used Restrictions before, I have a whole video on what it allows you to do.  It’s a little buried with the newest iOS, but to get there you go into Settings, Screen Time, Content & Privacy Restrictions.  

First, you’ll need to create a passcode to get into the Restrictions area.  Go back into screen time and set a passcode.  This is different from the passcode to open the phone. Obviously, you should keep this secret from your child or else he can go in and change everything back.  Once you have done this, choose Content & Privacy Restrictions and do the following things:

• First turn on Content & Privacy Restrictions, next 
• Go into iTunes & App Store Purchases and Turn off ability to install new apps, delete apps, or do in-app purchases - this means the apps that you deleted stay deleted and your kid can’t just download them again from the cloud
• Go into Allowed Apps and disable Internet browser and any other indigenous app that you want to restrict.  I used to keep the browser, but my son figured out a way to get around the download restriction using the browser, so I now restrict access to Safari as well. 

Okay — now you can give the phone back to your kid.  They should be able to use rudimentary communication tools like texting and email and any school related apps, but nothing else. Once the grounding period is over, you can 

Release the Restrictions 

Go back into the Restrictions area and put in your passcode. Now you can turn on the ability to download apps, delete apps, and do in-app purchases.  Also turn the Internet browser back on. At this point, I just hand the phone back to the kid and allow him to download all of the apps that he wants — I don’t do this for him. 

While you are here and if you haven’t used Restrictions up to this point, I would suggest turning on some basic content Restrictions for your kid not just when he is grounded. Under Content Restrictions, go down to Web Content and select limit adult websites. You may also want to restrict explicit music, movies or TV shows, but know that this only applies to media they access from iTunes. 

And that’s it!  My son is grounded an embarrassing amount of time, so I use this a lot. Let me know what you think!  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!