The screen-time app for the parent. Not the kid.

Apple Screen Time, Google Family Link, Bark, and Qustodio already do parental controls well. ScreenFine is not in that category. It does not lock your kid's phone, manage your kid's screen time, or report on your kid's usage. It runs on one device. Yours.

The use case is the parent who has noticed the gap between the rule given to the kid and the behaviour the kid actually sees from the adult in the room. "Put the phone down at dinner" is hard to enforce on a ten year old when the parent's own daily phone time is over five hours. ScreenFine treats that gap as the thing to fix, on the adult side, with a mechanism the adult brain responds to.

A growing body of developmental research uses the term "technoference" for parent phone use during interactions with their children. McDaniel and Radesky published a series of papers from 2018 onward linking higher technoference scores to higher reports of child externalizing behaviour (whining, frustration, attention-seeking) over time. The directionality is genuinely complicated; the correlation is well-documented.

Coyne and colleagues at Brigham Young have published longitudinal work on adolescents and parents on the same topic, with similar findings on emotional availability. The headline is simple: the phone is not neutral during family time. It is a third party with claims on the parent's attention.

Rules for the kid will only do so much against the picture they are watching every day. The most direct intervention is the one that constrains the parent's phone use during the windows that matter most: meals, mornings, the hour after school. That is what ScreenFine constrains, with a consequence designed to be felt by an adult.