ARAs new apps and technological advances keep pushing forward, parents and care givers can sometimes struggle to keep up. Young people and apps go together like bread and butter but the family members who surround them may not be as fully up to speed.
Parental controls can offer some boundaries to those who want their family members to enjoy apps whilst deciding on what they consider to be safe and available to their children. Many online platforms incorporate these to allow parents to have more control. We even did our own checklists to show how easy it is!
Download Social Media Checklists
Tiktok’s Family Pairing Feature
In response to this, TikTok joined forces with Internet Matters in their research to create and release the Family Pairing feature earlier this year. This feature lets parents link their TikTok account to their family members to enable a variety of new content and privacy settings.
Using the Family Pairing feature can allow parents to guide their child’s TikTok experience in a way that covers how they browse for content and how they interact with others. Some of the features include:
- Searching: You can decide what can be searched for. This includes content, users, hashtags, or sounds
- Screen Time Management: Sets how long you want your child to spend on TikTok each day
- Restricted Mode: You can limit the content that may be inappropriate in the feed
- Comments: You can decide who can comment on videos (everyone, friends, no one)
- Discoverability: You can decide on whether the account is private or public
- Liked Videos: You can decide whether others can see the list of videos your child has liked
- Direct Messages: Turns off direct messaging.
Using Family Pairing
If your child is just starting to experience apps such as TikTok, then using features such as Family Pairing may gradually settle them in whilst allowing you to have more control. As well as this, it can educate and encourage the family to consider how important online safety is on social media platforms.
If you implement the feature yourself, you can remove it when you feel your child is old enough to have the full experience. They may even choose to continue using the Family Pairing feature themselves. Despite how you choose to use it, creating online safety awareness for the whole family is an important step forward in any household!
To learn more about other TikTok parental controls, you can download our checklist for free!
