iPhone · guide

How to turn off parental controls on iPhone, and what stays on

By Alberto Gulotta · Updated 23 September 2026 · 11 min read

The instruction for how to turn off parental controls on iPhone is three taps, and the useful part is the sentence Apple puts before them — the one that says the switch is not always yours to use.

The route is worth noticing, because the setting is not where its name suggests. It is not under Privacy and not under anything called Restrictions: it is under Family, behind the child’s name. What that ordering tells you is that in Apple’s arrangement these controls hang off a person in your family group rather than off a handset — which is also why the Family Sharing step below comes first.

That has a consequence worth knowing before you start. Apple’s setup order is Family Sharing first — “Make sure you have Family Sharing set up” — and it also decides who may change anything: “You can set parental controls from your own iPhone or iPad as long as you’re the Family Sharing organizer or a parent/guardian in the Family Sharing group.” If the controls you are looking for are not there, the missing piece is often further back than the settings screen.

And a note about the software versions, which is where the confusion comes from when a change appears to have had no effect. Apple: “To access these updated parental controls, make sure every device in your Family Sharing group is using these software versions.” If that is not possible, Apple says what to do instead: “if you can’t update every device in your Family Sharing group, you can continue to use the previous version of Screen Time and parental controls, or adjust the parental controls directly on the child’s device.” A phone left a version behind can be the reason the family group disagrees with itself.

It is also worth knowing what the master switch actually governs, because it is narrower than “parental controls”. Apple’s own line for it is the container’s job description — “Content & Privacy Restrictions let you manage Apple content, apps, and settings for your child’s device” — and the things it holds are the ones reached by tapping it: age-based content restrictions, Siri restrictions, Game Center restrictions, privacy restrictions and Screen Distance. Everything else a parent sets up on that phone is reached by a different tap from the same screen, and is not inside the container at all.

Those four are the reason “turn off parental controls” and “turn off Screen Time” are not the same instruction. Content & Privacy Restrictions is one tap among several under the child’s name, and turning it off leaves the others where they are — so a household that wants the communication protections without the content rules is asking for a different tap, not for this switch.

On the passcode, and what this guide will not do. Apple’s route asks for the Screen Time passcode, and there is a large genre of pages promising to remove parental controls without it. This guide does not carry those methods: restrictions on a child’s device were set by somebody with the authority to set them, and a guide to defeating them is a guide to defeating that person. If you are the parent and it is your own passcode you have forgotten, that is a different question with a documented answer, and it belongs on the Screen Time guide rather than here.

One thing this switch does not touch, and it is the other half of the same worry. Apple’s restrictions govern this device. What a company may collect from a child is governed elsewhere: in the United States by the COPPA Rule, which the Federal Trade Commission enforces on sites and services “directed to children under 13”, and on general-audience services that know they are collecting from that age. The agency’s summary of what a parent keeps is the part that survives any change on this screen: “You also have the right to retract your consent any time, and to have any information collected about your child deleted.” Turning Content & Privacy Restrictions off does nothing to that, in either direction.

The guides below take it three ways: the switch and what pausing means, what sits inside the container and what does not, and the neighbouring settings — including the one the name Screen Time is normally taken to mean.

Not covered here. It will not tell you how to remove restrictions without the passcode. Those controls were set by somebody entitled to set them, and this site is not going to help take them off.

It will not recommend a third-party parental control app. Apple documents the built-in controls, and judging the products against them needs testing this guide has not done.

And it will not promise the switch will work. Apple writes that in some places Screen Time, Ask to Buy, Ask to Browse and content restrictions for apps can’t be turned off at all, and a page that skipped that sentence would be selling a route that ends at a wall. What holds instead is simple: the statement that some parental controls are on by default and cannot be removed is Apple’s own, quoted with the Family Sharing prerequisite and the version requirement.