It's apparent that many TikTok users can spend hours scrolling through video after video, so much so that even TikTok is implementing a feature that will help reduce the hours spent by teens on the app.
Limiting Screen Time for Teens
TikTok is releasing a new feature for teens, families, and the TikTok community in general, which is part of the company's efforts in improving its screen time tool to provide more custom options. A new default setting has been introduced for teen accounts.
Accounts that belong to users below 18 years old qualify for the category, and will be given a 60-minute screen time limit per day. TikTok consulted the current academic research and experts from the Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children's Hospital to set the appropriate limit.
Teenage account holders may continue watching beyond the given time, of course, but with the expansion of Family Pairing and parental controls, they will only be able to do so when an adult enters a passcode. This provides parents with an "active decision " to extend screen time.
As for users under 13 years old, they will also be getting the same 60-minute screen time limit. Although, an approved extension will only grant them 30 minutes more. The company itself is urging its users to limit their watch time if they spend more than 100 hours a day.
The short-form video app has released a prompt in the last year to encourage teenagers to enable screen time management. The new feature has built on that and helped increase the use of the screen time tools by 234%, according to a TikTok blog post.
They also claim that the feature adds to the already existing safety settings for teen accounts, like how users aged 13 to 15 years old have accounts that are set to private by default, which lets teens choose what to share, as well as when, and with whom.
How It Works
In addition to the already existing features for Family Pairing, they can now set custom daily screen time limits. Guardians can use Family Pairing to assign a customized time daily for their teenagers, which might depend on which day it is (like a school night or a weekend).
There's also the screen time dashboard which allows parents or caregivers to view summaries of the time spent on the app. That includes the number of times the app was opened, as well as the breakdown of the total time spent on the app during the day or the night.
The adult supervising the teen can also choose to mute the notifications of the app at a given time. This helps the parents keep their teen undisturbed. The new setting will let the adult set a schedule to mute the notifications of the user under 15's account.
Furthermore, TikTok will soon release a feature that will let anyone set a customized screen time for themselves for each day, as well as set a schedule for muting notifications. The sleep reminder feature can remind people when it's time to log off through a pop-up.
