As part of TikTok’s collection of protective measures and community guidelines, parents can impose their own parental controls on their children’s accounts.
In this article, we’re sharing the benefits of parental controls and how to set them on your child’s app.
What Are Parental Controls?
Parental controls are designed to limit younger users’ exposure to mature and adult content, by granting their parents the ability to restrict the content they can see.
Parental controls use family pairing, with parents needing access to their child’s TikTok account in order to set up the restrictions. Once activated, the parents app can be linked to their child’s app, to prevent them from being able to reverse the restrictions themselves.
Some of the controls that can be imposed include setting a screen time limit for TikTok use, and filtering out any content that you deem inappropriate.
The Benefits of Parental Controls on TikTok
The benefits of having parental controls activated are, for the parents, wide-ranging and clearly identifiable.
Setting limits on screen time means that young users do not waste hours scrolling through TikTok videos while restricting and filtering topics and keywords helps to keep their eyes away from mature and unsuitable content.
Parental controls also enable parents to block direct messages to their child’s account, again protecting them from unsolicited and unwanted content. And finally, parental controls give the parent the ability to make their child’s account private or public.
How to Activate Parental Controls
With all that in mind, how do you activate parental controls?
First you need to make sure that your TikTok accounts are compatible using family pairing. To do this, navigate to your own TikTok profile on your device and head into the ‘Settings and Privacy’ menu.
Tap ‘Family Pairing’ from the list and then ‘Continue’.
When prompted, select ‘Parent’ from the options and then utilise the on-screen QR code to connect your account with your child’s.
Once the two accounts are connected, the parent will be able to access and control the privacy settings, screen limits, and other details of their child’s account from their device. The overriding benefit of using the Family Pairing process is that the child is unable to reverse the settings from their own device – and you can protect your own parental controls access with a password.
Unless they know your password and can hack your account, this gives you optimum control over their account, to keep them safe.
We really hope this helps to ease your concerns and give your child the freedom to use TikTok but in a safe and controlled way.
