TikTok announced that it in the coming weeks, every account belonging to a user below age 18 will automatically be set to a 60-minute daily screen time limit. When the one-hour 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.
There’s no collectively endorsed position on how much screen time is ‘too much,’ but TikTok came up with this limit based on the current academic research and experts from the Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children’s Hospital.
According to TikTok: “Research also shows that being more aware of how we spend our time can help us be more intentional about the decisions we make. So we’re also prompting teens to set a daily screen time limit if they opt out of the 60-minute default and spend more than 100 minutes on TikTok in a day. This builds on a prompt we rolled out last year to encourage teens to enable screen time management; our tests found this approach helped increase the use of our screen time tools by 234%. In addition, we’ll send every teen account a weekly inbox notification with a recap of their screen time.”
Parents of children using the Family Pairing option on the app will also be able to set screen time limits, as well as access a dashboard which would give a breakdown of app usage. There’s also a new setting that lets parents set a schedule to mute notifications for their teens.
The company will also introduce a sleep reminder to help users more easily plan when they want to be offline at night.
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