TikTok is immensely popular with teenagers, and even younger children. And although the app’s rules don’t allow explicitly inappropriate content, there’s still a lot on there that parents probably don’t want their kids seeing.
Luckily, TikTok offers a few different ways for parents to limit what their kids can do and see on the app. Here’s a guide on how to use TikTok’s parental controls.
There are three different ways to put limits on what a TikTok account can do or see.
You’ll find all them in your account’s settings menu. Open TikTok and tap the Profile icon in the bottom-right corner, then tap the three dots in the top-right and select Settings and privacy when it appears.
First, you can tap Content preferences to restrict certain videos. Here you can Filter out specific keywords — any videos that have those words in their description or stickers won’t appear on your feed. You can also turn on Restricted Mode, which uses TikTok’s AI to hide videos that might be “inappropriate for some people.”
Next, you can select Screen time. This opens a detailed menu that shows how much time you’ve spent using TikTok recently, and lets you turn on a Daily screen time timer for the app.
With this feature enabled, if you use TikTok too much in one day, you’ll get a notification, and you’ll need to enter a password before you can use the app anymore. The best way for parents to use this is to set a password, but keep the code secret from their child.
You can also use this menu to turn on Screen time breaks, which are occasional notifications that remind the user to take a break without locking them out of the app. And turning on the Weekly screen time updates option lets TikTok send the user a message each week showing how much time they spent watching.
Finally, you can set up Family Pairing. The Family Pairing feature lets parents link their own TikTok account to their child’s, and control the child’s content and privacy settings remotely. This includes setting screen time limits, setting their profile to private, and more.
To set it up, use two phones to open up both the parent and child’s TikTok accounts. On both phones, head to the Settings menu and tap Family Pairing, and then Continue. On each phone, choose whether that phone is logged into the Parent or Teen account.
The Parent account will get a QR code. Use the phone logged into the Teen account to scan the code.
You’ve now got two linked TikTok accounts, and the Parent account can alter the Teen’s settings by opening the Family Pairing menu again. You can also come back to this menu to link another Teen account.