TikTok, Roblox and Google updates were recently announced, impacting parent features. Learn what these changes mean for your child, and get guidance on setting new features up with advice below.
Summary
- TikTok Family Pairing and Sleep Reminders
- Roblox’s enhanced blocking features
- School Time settings on Google Family Link
- Supporting resources
What updates TikTok has made
Launched last month, TikTok announced updated features to Family Pairing along with updates to support wellbeing.
Family Pairing updates
Family Pairing is a tool that lets parents link their account to their teen’s account, giving them access to certain parental controls.
With Family Pairing, parents can:
- Set daily screen time limits;
- Review teens’ time spent on TikTok;
- Customise their teens’ video feed;
- Set their teens’ account to private;
- Manage push notifications.
Along with other features, a major update within TikTok’s family pairing includes the ‘Time Away’ feature. While under-16s’ notifications are automatically muted overnight, Time Away lets parents decide when to make TikTok inaccessible. Common times to use this feature might include during school hours or between certain hours at home.
To set this up, go into the Screen Time settings on your account (via Family Pairing) and choose ‘Schedule time away’. Here, you can set time away for every day of the week, which might change depending on your teen’s needs.
Teen’s screen time updates
In addition to the Family Pairing updates, TikTok also introduced tools to support teens’ wellbeing through sleep.
Prior to this update, teens could set their own screen time break reminders in addition to the daily screen time limits parents set. However, ‘sleep reminders’ is a new feature.
With sleep reminders, teens can set up a start time for sleep hours. This setting will remain active for 8 hours from the start time, meaning teens can’t customise the end time. This aligns with teens’ need for at least 8 hours of sleep per day.
During this time, if a teen uses their TikTok app, a reminder will come up encouraging them to go to sleep. If they stay on, another notification that’s more difficult to remove will come up.
As a part of these sleep reminders, TikTok also announced that any under-16 using the app after 10PM will see a wind down feature. This takes over the whole screen and includes calming music to help teens unwind. TikTok has said they will introduce meditation exercises in the coming weeks as well.
Which Roblox updates might impact your family
This month, Roblox announced new tools to help parents personalise children’s experiences on the platform. This impacts the Parental Controls feature available on every child’s Roblox account, but specifically those under 13-years-old. Setting up parental controls on Roblox means that these features are all protected by a PIN you set.
Blocking friends
Previously, parents making use of parental controls on their child’s Roblox account could view their child’s friends list. However, they weren’t able to take action. With the recent updates, Roblox now lets parents block friends that they don’t want their child direct messaging. Parents can also report these users if they believe they’re breaking a policy.
If a child under-13 wants to unblock the friend, they must send a request to their parent. This will hopefully encourage more conversation around safe online interactions.
Roblox's updates to parental controls
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Blocking experiences
Content on Roblox is user-generated, which means there are lots of different games or ‘experiences’ children can engage with. Parents can set content maturity levels within their child’s account to reduce the likelihood of them coming across inappropriate content. However, the new update now lets parents block specific games within those levels. This means that if you find an experience inappropriate for your child despite it sitting within the right maturity level, you can block them from access it.
As with the blocking friends feature, children under 13-years-old can request that these experiences be unblocked.
In-depth screen time reports
Again, this feature already existed within Roblox parental controls. However, the platform has now added an option for more detail.
Previously, you could see how much time your child spent on Roblox. Now, you can see which experiences they spend their time participating in. This helps you have important conversations with your child about appropriate games and can also help you block those experiences you don’t want them accessing at their age.
How Google Family Link has changed
In February of this year, Google Family Link also announced changes to its app. Google Family Link is a free parental controls app available for both Android and iOS devices. It lets parents set limits across apps, screen time and more across a whole device, making it a good choice for widespread online safety.
Appearance updates
Regular users of Google Family Link might have noticed some visual changes, which make navigating the app a little easier. The left menu, for example, once said ‘Highlights’, ‘Controls’ and ‘Location’. That is updated to say ‘Screen time,’ ‘Controls’ and ‘Location’, which makes it easier to find the settings you’re looking to customise.
School time
While the ‘school time’ feature was only available on the Fitbit Ace and Samsung Galaxy Watch for Kids, it is now available on Android phones and tablets too. The school time feature lets you lock down the device during set hours to minimise distractions. You can also set break times to allow your child time on their device during school time.
Parent-managed contacts
Another feature that was announced but is not yet live is the ability for parents to approve contacts for children to text and call on Android phones. This is a feature already available on the Galaxy Watch for Kids. If a child wishes to add a new contact, parents must approve them.
Unfortunately, this will not impact messaging apps that do not use the Android contact lists, such as WhatsApp. For specific apps, you should explore those parental controls.
