I (15M) have lived with my current foster parents since I was 9 years old but I’ve been in foster care since I was 6. I will call my foster parents ‘Henry’ and ‘Erin’. I got a new phone as an early christmas present from my biological dad, it is an iphone 16 pro max, which is the phone I wanted so I am very happy about it. My previous phone was an iphone 11 and it was bought by Henry and Erin.

On my old phone Henry and Erin had set up loads of parental controls on it, so I couldn’t download any apps without them approving it, I couldn’t turn off share my location, I couldn’t change my passcode, it would lock everything except their contacts at 8pm every night until after school and they had a timelimit on youtube so I could only watch it for 30 mins within the time where my phone was unlocked anyway and I could only go on websites that they approved off (like there was a list that I could go on and I couldn’t go on anything that they didn’t manually add to that list). These all really annoyed me, but whenever I asked for them to be turned off they told me that they bought the phone and so these were the rules.

Now I was given my new phone by my dad on monday and I haven’t used it yet because they’re telling me that I have to let them put the same restrictions on the new phone as they did my old phone. I said no because that isn’t fair, I should be allowed to use my phone as my dad says because he paid for it. I said to them that my dad paid for the phone so it was his choice and that he doesn’t want me to have those restrictions on.

But now they’ve changed and said it doens’t matter who bought the phone even though that was their whole point before. Now theyre saying that because I am living with them I have to follow their rules and the rule for having a phone in this house is that they put restrictions on it. I don't think that is fair at all considering they didn’t buy the phone?? I don’t see how they can do this?

Before I got home from school on monday they took the phone out of the box my dad sent it in and set up all the restrictions and now I’m trying to figure out a way to take them off. I am thinking about complaining to my social worker because it is not fair that they put these restrictions on my phone even though they didn’t pay for it?