A phone and screen-time contract you can both actually sign

The count above the contract says how many clauses are theirs and how many are yours. That number is the reason this page exists.

Every printable phone contract on the web is a list of things a child must do, with a signature line for the child at the bottom and often one for a parent beside it. A twelve-year-old reads that in about four seconds and understands exactly what it is: a set of rules with an autograph collected under duress. They will sign it, because the alternative is not having a phone. They will not keep it, because nothing in it was ever negotiated.

So a third of the library is clauses on the adults' side, and they are the ones that make the rest enforceable. We follow the mealtime rule on our own phones in front of you. When you tell us something difficult, we deal with the thing rather than taking the phone away. We do not read your messages without telling you, and we say what made us want to. We do not post photos of you without asking.

Take those out and the page says so, once, before you print. You can print it anyway. It is your house. But the households that come back having had the argument anyway are usually the ones that printed the one-sided version.

The library has about fifty clauses in it. The contract starts with about twenty of them, and everything else sits in a list underneath waiting to be added.

That is the opposite of how these pages usually work, and it is deliberate. The first version of this tool put all fifty on the page and let you delete what you did not want, which is how the printable checklists on the rest of this site work and is the right shape for them — nobody signs a maintenance schedule. Here it produced a fifty-three-clause document, and a fifty-three-clause document is not an agreement between two people. It is terms and conditions, and it gets accepted in the same spirit.

So what you get first is the short version: the clauses where households that leave them out tend to have the fight instead. If this house needs the one about the bathroom, or the one about the razors, or the one about the shed, it is one tap below. Most households add three or four and print.

The age band and the five switches above the contract are not preferences. They are the difference between a contract for your child and a contract for a child, and they filter the list underneath as well as the draft above it.

Age decides about fifteen clauses on its own, and in both directions. A ten-year-old gets "the phone does not come into the bathroom" and "you may not have accounts we do not know about"; a sixteen-year-old gets neither, and gets instead the only clause on the page that is about anybody dying — never touch the phone while driving, including at a red light. Handing a seventeen-year-old a contract written for a child is how the whole exercise gets dismissed in the first thirty seconds.

The switches do the rest. No social media takes out the group-chat clauses and the ones about posting. No online games takes out voice chat and friend requests from strangers in a game. A school that collects phones at the gate does not need two clauses about following the school's phone rules. And if there are younger children in the house, one clause appears that most families never think of: that a brother or sister cannot say no to having their photo posted the way a friend can.

Several clauses print with a ruled blank rather than a number: the phone charges somewhere overnight, it goes there by some time, the screen-time limit on a school night, what they pay towards it, how long it goes away for the first time this agreement is broken.

Those are deliberately empty, and the tool will not fill them in. A bedtime that arrives preprinted on a document is an announcement, and an announcement is the thing that gets ignored at half past eleven. A bedtime written into the blank in front of them, in the conversation where they argued for half an hour later and got fifteen minutes, is a bedtime with their fingerprints on it.

It is also the practical reason to print this rather than email it. The blanks are where the negotiation happens, and a pen is what makes it visible that there was one.

Every clause on the first draft carries a dot, and that is not decoration: the dot is why it is there. They are not the important ones — the important clause is whichever one your house is fighting about. They are the ones where households that leave it out tend to have the fight instead.

Four of them are worth naming here. The phone does not sleep in the bedroom, which is the single clause that changes how much sleep a teenager gets. You will not be in trouble for telling us about something you saw, which is the clause that decides whether you find out about the group chat in week one or in month six. Nothing gets taken away without being told why, and without it having been in here first, which is what stops the contract becoming a pretext. And we will read this again on a date, which is the one below.

If you take one of those out, the page names it back to you once and then leaves it alone. You may well have a good reason, and there is a button to put them all back. It is worth knowing which ones you decided against.

There is a field for when the two of you will read the contract again, and it prints on the signature line. Fill it in.

A phone contract with no expiry is a contract that gets renegotiated by attrition instead: the clause about the bathroom quietly stops being enforced, then the one about the table, and by the spring the document on the fridge has no relationship to the house it is in. Nobody ever says so out loud, which means nobody ever gets to trade the bathroom clause for something they wanted.

Three months is about right for a first phone, and a birthday is about right after that. What you are buying with the date is not tidiness. It is the ability to say yes to something later — a later bedtime, the phone in the bedroom at weekends — as a thing that was earned on a scheduled day, rather than as a rule that eroded.

Print two copies, and use them differently. One goes wherever the phone actually charges overnight, because that is the clause that gets tested every single night and it should be legible from where the argument happens. The other goes wherever this family keeps things it has agreed — the folder with the passports, or the drawer with the school letters.

Sign it in front of each other, with the blanks filled in as you go, and read the adults' section out loud. It takes four minutes. It is the only part of this that a printed page can do and a group chat cannot.

One small thing that decides whether any of it survives: do not put the phone away the first time as a demonstration. A contract enforced for effect in week one teaches that it is a performance. The first real breach will arrive, and the clause about the first time already says what happens.

This is a family agreement about a telephone. It is not a legal contract in any sense a court would recognise, it creates no obligation anybody can enforce against anybody, and no clause in it has been reviewed by a lawyer or a clinician. If you are drafting something about a phone as part of a custody arrangement, take it to the person handling that; a printed sheet from a website is not that document.

It is also not monitoring software, and there is deliberately nothing here that pretends to be. The clauses about location say only that they know when you can see where they are, which is the part that is about trust rather than technology.

A signed sheet is a snapshot, and it has two failure modes. It cannot remember, so in February nobody can agree on whether the screen-time number was one hour or ninety minutes, and both of you are sure. And it cannot be changed without being reprinted, so the version on the fridge slowly stops being the version everybody is actually living under.

You have outgrown the sheet when you have renegotiated it twice and cannot say what changed. At that point what you need is not a better contract but something that holds the current one: the Family Contract app keeps the clauses with their history, so a change is dated and both sides can see what it replaced, and a teenager can read the current version without asking. Parental Agreement is the same shape for two adults who need to agree with each other first — which, in most households, is the negotiation that actually decides the phone rules. Curfew Manager handles the one clause that is really a schedule, and Rewards and Privileges is where "earned a later bedtime" stops being a memory and becomes a thing with a date on it.

• Family Contract
• Parental Agreement
• Curfew Manager
• Rewards

Every app in the library is included with the household plan. This page stays free either way.

• Giving a teenager more freedom without losing the thread
• How to get a loud house quiet without handing out tablets
• Name the invisible work, then see who is actually holding it
• Make a printable chore chart for your family
• See a custody schedule on a calendar, and count the overnights