TikTok, the famous short-form video-sharing app is extremely popular amongst users of all age groups, but it is especially very attractive for teenagers. However, teenagers often get more engrossed with such apps and forget to focus on other important things in life. Increased screen time can affect their studies, and increased exposure to various people on the platform can benefit them and make them learn new things, but can also expose them to certain things that will not have a positive impact on their minds. So, to take care of all these issues and to control teenagers a bit, TikTok introduced the Family Pairing feature back in April. This feature lets the parents of teenagers connect their accounts with their children’s. But linking with their accounts, parents can then control their screen time, look into their conversations in the direct messages, and also put their kid’s account in the Restricted Mode.
The Restricted Mode puts the account in a fairly safe mode where the search results are all optimized to provide a more moderated and filtered content.
Now, TikTok has announced to expand these parental controls through the Family Pairing feature. The newly added tools allow the parents to control various aspects of the accounts of their teenage children.
First of all, they can choose to put their children’s account in Private Mode from being Public. This will restrict the discoverability of the child’s account and only those people can connect with them whom the teenage child knows personally. For a minor child, this is an important setting to restrict their exposure to all sorts of people on the platform. But teenagers often turn off their Private settings and go Public because they are looking out for ways to generate more views and more followers. This can lead them to troubling situations, and now, if parents feel the need, they can control this setting for their teenager’s account.
Secondly, parents can now enable or disable access to the search bar in TikTok. Through the search bar, users can look up people, content, hashtags, and sounds. But now, the parents of a teenager can control their search capabilities too over TikTok.
Parents can also control whether other people can see their teenager’s liked videos or not on their profile. Also, parents can even control who can comment on their teenager’s videos and who cannot.
While all these controls are pretty good and they can have a positive impact on the social media usage of teenaged children, but the parents have to be careful to not overuse these controls or not to exploit their position to make their kids feel suffocated.
Even control should be exercised in ‘control!’
The Restricted Mode puts the account in a fairly safe mode where the search results are all optimized to provide a more moderated and filtered content.
Now, TikTok has announced to expand these parental controls through the Family Pairing feature. The newly added tools allow the parents to control various aspects of the accounts of their teenage children.
First of all, they can choose to put their children’s account in Private Mode from being Public. This will restrict the discoverability of the child’s account and only those people can connect with them whom the teenage child knows personally. For a minor child, this is an important setting to restrict their exposure to all sorts of people on the platform. But teenagers often turn off their Private settings and go Public because they are looking out for ways to generate more views and more followers. This can lead them to troubling situations, and now, if parents feel the need, they can control this setting for their teenager’s account.
Secondly, parents can now enable or disable access to the search bar in TikTok. Through the search bar, users can look up people, content, hashtags, and sounds. But now, the parents of a teenager can control their search capabilities too over TikTok.
Parents can also control whether other people can see their teenager’s liked videos or not on their profile. Also, parents can even control who can comment on their teenager’s videos and who cannot.
Today we're expanding our Family Pairing feature with new tools families can use to create the TikTok experience that's right for them, including added privacy and content guardrails that can be enabled from a parent's account. https://t.co/Sd32PcqE3V pic.twitter.com/PXEL01UBXv
— TikTok_Comms (@tiktok_comms) November 17, 2020
While all these controls are pretty good and they can have a positive impact on the social media usage of teenaged children, but the parents have to be careful to not overuse these controls or not to exploit their position to make their kids feel suffocated.
Even control should be exercised in ‘control!’
