A newly paired child in TheTruthSpy has no screen time limit at all. Nothing is blocked, nothing is capped, and the app collects usage without acting on it. That is deliberate, and it is the opposite of how most parental control software ships. Here is why, and what to do with the fortnight that follows.
Your first two weeks, in order
Pair the phone. Set nothing.
Install, pair with the code, grant the permissions together, and stop. Do not set a budget tonight. You do not yet know whether their evening goes on a homework app or a game, and a limit you guess at is almost always wrong.
Tell them plainly what happens next: “for a week this just counts, then we'll look at it together and agree something.” A child who knows the counting phase is coming argues about the number later, not about the app now.
Watch, and resist setting anything.
This is the week that makes the difference, and it is the one most parents skip. Open the panel once a day and look at where the hours actually went. Almost everyone is surprised by something — usually that the app they were worried about is not the one eating the evening.
Two numbers are worth writing down: an ordinary school night, and a Saturday. Those become your two budgets, and because they came from real data, they are defensible.
Set the first budget together, slightly generously.
Show them the week. Ask what they would cut. Set the weekday budget a little above their actual average rather than below it, and a longer one for weekends.
A first limit that bites immediately gets fought and then abandoned. A first limit that is felt occasionally gets accepted, and can be tightened in a month without a row. You are setting a precedent more than a number.
Expect the ask-for-more request, and answer it properly.
They will hit the limit mid-episode and send a request. Whatever you decide, decide it — fifteen minutes, thirty, or not tonight. The one answer that damages the arrangement is no answer, because silence teaches them the system is arbitrary.
Saying yes is not losing. A limit you can negotiate is a limit that survives; a limit that never moves gets routed around.
Add a bedtime window before you tighten the number.
By now you can see whether the problem is total hours or the time of day they happen. Usually it is the second. A phone-free window from 21:30 fixes more than shaving thirty minutes off a daily total, and it is far easier to explain.
Add school hours and a homework block if they help. Leave the daily number alone for another fortnight.
What you can actually set, once you know what to set
Four controls, and they stack. Most families end up using two.
| Control | What it does | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| Daily budget | A total for the day, separate for weekdays and weekends | Total hours are the problem. Start here. |
| Bedtime / school window | Phone-free between two times, with calls to you still working | When is the problem rather than how long — which is more often the case. |
| Per-app limit | A cap on one app, counted separately | One game or one feed is doing the damage and the rest is fine. |
| Earned time | Minutes added for finishing chores you set | You want the limit to be a system they can work with rather than a wall. |
A starting point by age
These are conventions, not evidence — nobody has established a correct number of minutes, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. Treat them as a sane opening bid to adjust from, and weigh what the time is spent on over how much of it there is.
| Age | Weekday, recreational | Bedtime window | What usually matters more |
|---|---|---|---|
| 6–9 | 30–60 min | 19:30 | What they can reach, not how long. Filtering beats timing at this age. |
| 10–12 | 1–2 hours | 20:30 | The first phone year. Habits set now are the ones you live with. |
| 13–15 | 2–3 hours | 21:30 | Sleep. Almost every problem at this age traces back to it. |
| 16+ | Negotiated, if at all | Theirs to manage | Handing the decision over, before they take it anyway. |
Homework and school apps sit outside the budget entirely, and calls to you never count against anything. A limit that stops a child phoning a parent is a broken limit, whatever the number says.
Three things that go wrong, and what to do
“They just use it anyway on the school Chromebook”
This is the most common failure, and it is not a failure of the limit. A phone budget controls a phone. A determined thirteen-year-old with a laptop, a school device and a games console has three other routes and will find all of them.
The fix is not a tighter phone limit, which only makes the phone the least attractive device. It is agreeing the rule at the level of the house rather than the device: the hour is the hour, whichever screen it happens on.
“Every evening is now an argument about the phone”
Usually a sign the number is too tight, or that it arrives with no warning. A limit that ends mid-conversation or mid-round feels like a punishment for something they were doing when it landed.
TheTruthSpy warns before the budget runs out so they can finish what they are doing, and the ask-for-more request gives them a legitimate move. If the arguing persists, the number is wrong — loosen it and tighten the bedtime window instead, which is far less contested because it is about sleep rather than about them.
“They uninstalled it”
They can. TheTruthSpy does not hide from uninstallation, does not disguise itself, and does not force permissions back on. Your panel tells you the phone stopped reporting, and that is the whole design.
An app that cannot be removed is an app nobody agreed to, and the arms race it starts is one a parent loses eventually and expensively. The recoverable version of this is the conversation about why they removed it; the unrecoverable version is the one where they found something you hid.
What sits alongside the clock
Limits answer how long, not what. For what a child reaches in those minutes, the web filter and the per-app blocking rules carry more weight, especially for a younger child.
Children can earn extra minutes through chores and rewards, which tends to end the nightly bargaining. The parental control guides cover sensible limits by age in more depth than a product page can.