Their side of the app, on your phone or theirs

The problem

What happens when you hand a child your phone to check off one chore?

Handing over an unlocked phone so a child can tick off a chore hands over everything else on it too: messages, photos, whatever else is open, and in this case the entire parent side of Reward Study, including the approvals queue and the ledger. The chore takes ten seconds. Undoing the access it required takes a lot longer to think through.

The problem is not that a child would necessarily do anything wrong with that access. It is that a parent should not have to trust a ten-year-old's restraint every single time a phone changes hands just so one task can be marked done. The Apple TV scoreboard was built around the same worry from a different angle: a remote sitting in a child's hand must not be able to approve their own chores, which is exactly why that screen is read-only and cannot touch a balance at all.

Kid Mode

How does Kid Mode work on a device you hand over?

Kid Mode turns whichever device you hand over into a version of the app that only shows that child's own side: their tasks, their reward shop, their balance and their history. A banner naming the child sits on screen the entire time, so nobody forgets which mode the device is in, including the child themselves.

Getting back out requires Face ID, Touch ID or a PIN, the same gate that protects every other parent action. A child cannot simply back out of Kid Mode by pressing the home button or force-quitting the app; the exit itself is the thing that is locked, not just the parent screens behind it.

Notifications stay scoped to whichever role is looking at the device, too. A device in Kid Mode gets told when something is approved with credits, rejected with a note, or hand-adjusted with a reason, since those are the things that matter to the child holding it, while a device is never notified about its own action, such as a parent being told a task was approved when that parent was the one who approved it.

Their own device

What changes when a child has their own iPhone or iPad instead?

Once a child has their own device, Reward Study can join it to the household through iCloud sharing rather than through Kid Mode. There is nothing to exit because there is nothing else on that device belonging to a parent: no banner, no lock screen inside the app, no unlock step of any kind, since the device itself is already the child's and nothing needs separating from anything else.

The two setups exist for the two real situations families are actually in. A shared family iPad calls for Kid Mode and its banner and exit. A child old enough to have their own phone calls for the quieter version, joined the same way a co-parent joins a shared household, through iCloud, with nothing to unlock because there is nothing to protect them from.

Either way, the child's device only ever shows their own side of the household. It cannot see another sibling's balance, cannot see the approvals queue waiting on a parent's decision, and cannot reach the ledger export or the parent PIN screen at all, regardless of whether it got there through Kid Mode or through iCloud sharing.

Parent Lock

What actually stops a child from reaching the parent side?

Every parent action in Reward Study, and every exit from Kid Mode, sits behind the same gate: Face ID or Touch ID first, with a parent-set PIN as the fallback if biometrics are not available. That PIN is stored as a salted, stretched hash in the device's own Keychain, never anywhere the app itself, or anything outside it, could read the plain value back out.

There is deliberately no device-passcode fallback. A child who knows the phone's own passcode, which happens in most families sooner or later, still cannot get past Parent Lock, because the two codes are unrelated on purpose. Knowing one tells you nothing about the other.

Parent Lock is what stands behind both routes into Kid Mode. It is the same gate on the exit button whether the device belongs to you or was borrowed from you for the afternoon, and it is the same gate on every other action a parent takes: approving a task, adjusting a balance by hand, or opening the export covered in the ledger's own PIN-gated export.

Which one to use

Kid Mode or their own device: how do you choose?

The honest answer is that the device decides it for you. If a child shares a phone or an iPad with a parent, Kid Mode is the only option that makes sense, since the same hardware still needs to be a parent's phone again five minutes later. If a child already has their own device, joining it through iCloud sharing is simpler and asks nothing of them at every open.

Both routes lead to the same household ledger and the same approvals queue on the parent side, so switching a child from one to the other later, say when they get their own phone for the first time, changes nothing about their history or their balance. If you are comparing this against what a subscription includes for a growing family, the plans are on pricing.