My specific use case for Screen Time - which I suspect is not that uncommon - is to restrict myself from spending too much time on particular apps, such as Instagram or Reddit. There is considerable demand for this type of software, given the discourse and press coverage it generates. There are naturally "analog" ways of going about restricting oneself from "over-using" such apps, but software is more exact and, given iCloud's capabilities, allows one to maintain the same daily threshold across my devices.
Select While I in general agree with and defend user-centred perspectives, I think there are quite a few flaws in your reasoning, but I'll refrain from overextending myself to avoid any prolonged arguments. There are several points to contend with but I'll take just one:
People who look at small humans and see a hierarchy where larger humans rule over those small humans are cruel
It's a true failure of the imagination that some people are now unable to conceive of a loving relationship that is "unequal" - but this is what relationships between parents and children are, for good reason - the alternative line of thinking terminates in a very ugly place indeed. Freedom does not equate with always getting what you want.
Your stance is not particularly unpopular. Our liberal-secular "be kind" culture is fascinated and driven by the thought that children have (and should have more) autonomy over their lives and, concomitantly, that parents are not the sole guardians of their offspring. There is a simultaneous push for adults to become more passive, and for children to have their "agency" recognised. The ideas of child agency and adult passivity illustrate the two faces of the modern conception of desire: on the one hand, agency is imagined as arising out of desire, meanwhile passivity is encouraged because it suggests a surrender to it. In reality, as all parents know, children do not have "autonomy": they are dependent on adults to set appropriate boundaries and create a sense of safety. The ideal consumer society is one in which children are fictionalised into "adult responsibility" in order to provide an alibi for the continued self-infantilisation of adults.
Teenagers are afforded a degree of autonomy - this is important - but we place that autonomy, like any other, within a social context, understanding that it must often operate with incomplete information or in the midst of confusing and tumultuous feelings. Teenagers are not expected to immediately comprehend themselves and know their authentic desires within the morass of contradictory feelings and impulses that characterise their experience, because they do not have the life experience necessary to contextualise and judge them. The reason "teenager" exists as a social category in the first place is an affordance by adult society in recognition of this; allowing young people a period in which to experiment and develop this capacity for judgement through new experiences. But this relies on the relevant adults using their better judgement to create the visible and invisible boundaries in which this development can occur - to remove these limits altogether in the name of some speculative ideal of "freedom" or "autonomy" is to radically overburden young people.
Young people are understandably fiercely protective of their autonomy because they are in the delicate process of building it from the ground up. Agency and personhood are not the same thing: children develop agency through the process of growing up. A child being subject to adult relations is having their personhood violated and the development of their agency sabotaged. It is the parents' responsibility to define healthy emotional borders between their world and the adult world.
