The Chinese own application TikTok is endeavoring to introduce parental control. By employing Tik Tok family mode, guardians or parents will able to link their Tik Tok account to their child’s accounts. So parents through their account can switch on or off the features of Tiktok for their children. Particularly, it incorporates the restricted mode. Where the manager of children accounts will able to filter the inappropriate content and even he/she can turn off the messaging service. Tiktok usually has an age limit of 13 years. However, there are pre-teens, who are still employing Tik Tok. As per the United Kingdom’s communication regulator namely, Ofcome. It has been reported that in 2019, Tiktok was used by 13 percent of all children. Who aged between 12 to 15 years and it was 8% higher than in 2018.
Tik Tok Family Mode Restrictions and its Method
Guardians or parents who have a Tiktok account or generate one for monitoring purposes can connect their account to their children’s account. So that they could be able to control the safety settings. Adults ought to open the application on both cell phones and then head to digital wellbeing setting so that parents or guardians can identify which cell phone belongs to them which one they require to control. Moreover, in order to connect the one phone with another, you need to scan the QR code from one phone to another, thereby providing control to parents over certain features of children’s accounts.
Some aspects of this controlling feature are as follows.
- Controller (parents or guardian) can turn off or on a restricted mode.
- The controller can block certain content.
- The controller can restrict the incoming messages to a particular selective set of people.
- Parents can put a maximum limit per day for the usage of Tiktok for their children
These features are available for Tiltok users for some time but it requires to be set on your child’s phone manually. Additionally, such features require users to set a password that needs to be revised after every 30 days.
Parents Discretion
So by employing Tik Tok family mode parents could become a good digital partner of their children, who can not only guide them about the appropriate use of Tiktok but can monitor their activities. It is vital because Tiktok in one way or another has caused serious damage to people. Especially, who are in their teens? In fact, there have been cases where people particularly, teens have lost their life. So, Tiktok is not an appropriate application for the pre-teens. Nevertheless, it is a software and its pros and cons depend. How, we use it. Therefore, it should be the choice of the parents or guardians whether they want their young ones to use the Tiktok or they want them to use it within certain restrictions set by them. In this regard, an expert from children’s Charities’ Coalition on Internet Safety in the UK said:
“I spent a lot of time on TikTok recently. The simple truth is it is no place for youngsters of 13 – their declared minimum age”.
