Earn it. Unlock it.
Agree the rules once, calmly, together. After that the app holds the line — so “five more minutes” stops being a conversation you have every single evening.
It’s that the rule is up for renegotiation every single time.
If the answer depends on how tired you are, how the day went, or how long they’re willing to push — then pushing works. They’d be irrational not to try. That’s not a discipline problem; it’s what happens when a limit is decided in the moment, by someone who is also cooking dinner.
Unlocked moves the decision out of the moment. You set what earns time and what it costs once, when nobody is upset. After that the answer is the same on a good Tuesday and a bad Friday — and it isn’t coming from you.
Most screen-time tools only subtract. This one gives your child something to aim at: bed made, room cleaned, twenty minutes of reading — each worth points they choose how to spend.
That flips the daily question from “why won’t you let me” to “what do I want to spend this on”. Streaks reward showing up rather than one big burst, and there’s a collection to build that has nothing to do with screens at all.
Together, decide what earns points and what it’s worth. Do it once, somewhere calm. Change it whenever it stops fitting.
Bed made, homework done, instrument practised. You approve it, or mark a challenge trusted and let it count itself.
Points buy minutes. The apps open, the clock runs while they’re used, and the shield comes back on its own.
This isn’t a chore chart with a reminder attached. It’s built on Apple’s Screen Time frameworks, and it fails closed.
The resting state is locked. Spending points is what removes a shield — nothing ever adds one. If the app crashes mid-session, Minecraft stays blocked. That direction is deliberate: the failure mode should never be “unlimited”.
Time counts as use, not wall clock. Put the iPad down and it stops. Thirty minutes means thirty minutes of playing.
Approvals arrive on your own phone, so you can settle them from wherever you are instead of borrowing their iPad.
A daily ceiling caps the total however many points they’ve banked, so one big Saturday of chores doesn’t become an unlimited Saturday of screens.
A warning arrives before time runs out, and curfew hours put screens away at either end of the day. Time already bought is paused, not lost.
Earned points are never clawed back, and one missed day a month is forgiven rather than wiping a streak they’ve worked weeks for.
Staying up later, picking the film, an hour out together. Worth keeping a few, so the app doesn’t quietly teach that screens are the best thing going.
Unlocked isn’t a prison with a timer. Allies are public-domain artwork unlocked by points and streaks — twelve per theme, with progress toward the next one always visible. Hundred Demons also carries twelve original short stories, one per creature, written for a confident young reader.
Five palettes per theme, from aged paper to neon on black.
No. Apple’s picker hands the app opaque identifiers — it can’t read which apps you chose, let alone what happens inside them. It never sees messages, photos, location or browsing. It isn’t a monitoring tool.
On your devices, and in your own private iCloud database if you’re signed in. There are no servers, no accounts and no analytics. Full privacy policy.
Deleting it removes its shields, so set a Screen Time passcode on their device and turn off app deletion. Setup walks you through it, and Support covers it too.
It shows when a session must end by, and warns before it does — but not a live countdown. Apple reports only that a threshold was crossed, never a running total, so a precise number would be a guess.
An iPhone or iPad running iOS 17 or later, and Apple’s Screen Time permission during setup. That permission is what makes the shield real. Blocking can’t be tested in the Simulator.
This won’t end every argument, and any app that promises that is selling something. What it does is take the nightly negotiation off the table and turn it into one conversation you have properly, in advance — about what’s worth doing, and what it’s worth.
The rules end up written down, visible to both of you, and the same every day. That turns out to be most of it.