TikTok adds new features for teens and families

TikTok has announced enhancements to its screen time controls, offering additional personalised choices, introducing fresh pre-set configurations for teenage profiles, and broadening the scope of Family Pairing by incorporating extra parental controls.

Changes to help teens manage their time on TikTok

As part of the announcement, every account below age 18 will automatically be set to a 60-minute daily screen time limit. If the 60-minute limit is reached, teens will be prompted to enter a passcode in order to continue watching, requiring them to make an active decision to extend that time.

1/ Today we’re announcing new well-being features for teens, families, and our broader community. We’re improving our screen time controls with more custom options, introducing new default settings for teen accounts, and expanding Family Pairing https://t.co/nx6sGshb6P pic.twitter.com/eMWZtZLwyj

— TikTokComms (@TikTokComms) March 1, 2023

The new features build upon the existing safety settings for teen accounts, including users aged 13-15 having their accounts set to private by default and only allowing direct messaging for those aged 16 and older. To host a Live, community members must be at least 18.

Helping families have conversations about digital well-being

TikTok has announced the addition of three new features to Family Pairing:
Custom daily screen time limits: Caregivers will be able to use Family Pairing to customise the daily screen time limit for their teen – including choosing different time limits depending on the day of the week – giving families more choices to match screen time to school schedules, holiday breaks or family travel.

Screen time dashboard: The screen time dashboard will be added to Family Pairing, which provides summaries of time on the app, the number of times TikTok was opened, and a breakdown of total time spent during the day and night.

Mute notifications: A new setting that enables parents to set a schedule to mute notifications for their teen. Accounts aged 13-15 already do not receive push notifications from 9pm and accounts aged 16-17 have push notifications disabled from 10pm.

TikTok remains focused on reaching parents with information they need about the platform’s safety features to help guide their teens and this is achieved through partnerships with creators, industry experts, and advertising campaigns focused on safety features.

New screen time controls for everyone

In addition to bringing these new features to Family Pairing, everyone will soon be able to set their own customised screen time limits for each day of the week and set a schedule to mute notifications.

TikTok is also rolling out a sleep reminder to help people more easily plan when they want to be offline at night. People can set a time, and when it’s reached, a pop-up will remind them it’s time to log off. These new features aim to help families establish an ongoing dialogue about safety and well-being in the digital world.

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