Parental Controls: An Integral Element Of TikTok Safety

Responsible social media platforms put a lot of thought, time, effort, and money into systems that protect user safety, and one of their most important responsibilities involves younger users. For ethical and legal reasons, the platforms try to ensure that children and teens aren’t exposed to content identified as “mature” or “adult” in nature.

TikTok, of course, has established robust systems to implement this goal. One sets age limits for TikTok account holders; those under age 13 aren’t eligible to join the platform, and those younger than 18 aren’t able to see so-called “restricted,” adult TikTok content. The ability to exchange direct messages and use some other app features is also limited for younger users.

Those guidelines may not be enough to satisfy many parents whose children have accounts on the app. A powerful set of parental controls supplements the default restrictions established by TikTok.

Here’s how they work and how to set them up.

Explaining TikTok’s Parental Controls

This TikTok feature allows parents or guardians to use their phones to manage a number of app settings for their children. They include:

• Restricted mode: Once teens turn 16, they can make their TikTok accounts “public” and use most of the platform’s restricted features (although they still can’t see adult content). The app’s parental controls allow parents to override many of those default permissions.
• Interactions: Parents can determine which users their children can exchange DMs with and who is allowed to engage with their account.
• Keyword filtering: This function lets parents prohibit their kids from seeing TikTok posts with specific words and phrases in their descriptions.
• Screen time: Parents are able to limit the amount of time their children can spend on the app each day. They can also block TikTok usage during specific times of the day (for example, during school or homework hours).
• Notifications: Parents can set limits on when children can receive push notifications on their phones (for instance, preventing them from appearing during sleep hours).
• Privacy settings: Some of the default privacy settings in effect for users under 18 can be changed by their parents.

Parents also have a full-featured dashboard that lets them see when and how long their children have been on the app, how their teen has customized their feed, their current privacy settings, and much more.

The feature is clearly an effective way for parents to monitor and place limits on their children’s TikTok use. It’s easy to use once it’s set up, too.

How To Put Parental Controls on TikTok

The key to TikTok parental controls is called “Family Pairing,” which links a parent’s and child’s apps to let the parent govern the child’s permissions and available functions. Enabling family pairing is required before the controls will work.

On the parent’s phone:

1. Open the app and go to the account’s TikTok profile by tapping the “Profile” icon at the bottom right of the home screen. 
2. Click the “Menu” icon (three horizontal lines) at the top right of the profile page.
3. Choose “Settings and profile” from the popup menu.
4. Scroll down to find “Family Pairing,” click the link, and then hit “Continue.”
5. Select “Parent.” A QR code will appear on the screen; put the parent’s phone aside for a moment.

Now, navigate to “Family pairing” on the child’s phone (as described above) and select “Teen.” Scan the parent’s QR code with the child’s phone, click “Link accounts,” and then confirm.

Once the setup is complete, you’ll not only be able to change the child’s settings and monitor their behavior, but you’ll also have the option to set a password for your phone (so the child can’t access and change the parental control settings).

Parental controls have proven to be an invaluable tool for managing teenagers’ access to and use of TikTok. They’re definitely worth the minute or two of setup time required.