Improve Your Kid’s Digital Wellbeing with Screen Time Management
The digital world is fast, vast, and fun — and that is exactly why it’s addictive. As a parent, you need to manage your child’s screen time and protect them from excessive use across allx platforms. Safes is a parental control app that helps you do that and more!
Digital devices offer us an endless list of benefits. They help us learn, communicate, and have fun. But as with all good things, too much screen time is can be harmful. Excessive screen time can lead to declined school performance, depression, anxiety, sleep disorder, and other mental and physical health issues.
These harmful effects can threat people at any age. But children are especially prone to them because they haven’t yet developed the discipline and self-control to use their devices in a balanced way. Therefore, it’s up to adults to supervise and manage their device usage through parental control solutions.
In this article, we offer a few ways to track and limit your child’s screen exposure using parental controls.
How Screen Time Limits Work?
To ensure children’s digital experience remains healthy, parental control apps help you schedule time away from screens. To do this, screen time features show you how much time your child spends on each app and on their phone overall.
Using this data, you can make informed decisions on:
- Blocking your child’s access to apps during bedtime
- Limit the overall device usage
- Managing how much time your child spends on certain apps like video games or social media
- Blocking irrelevant or distracting apps during certain times of day — like school hours.
How to Track and Limit Your Child’s Device Usage?
Excessive screen time has been a hot topic for years now, but device developers have been catching up only recently. Today, most smartphones, tablets, and desktop devices come with some form of built-in parental controls that help you manage and limit your child’s screen time.
Let’s see how they work on each operating system.
Built-in Screen Time Limit for Android
The Android operating system does not come with a built-in parental control feature to limit screen time. However, Google has developed its parental control solution called “Family Link.” Family Link helps parents protect children’s limit screen time, filter out inappropriate content, see children’s location live, and more. Family Link works on Android 7 and up as well as Chrome OS versions 83 and above.
How to Limit Screen Time with Google Family Link
To Set time limits remotely using your own device:
- Navigate to the Family Link
- Choose your child.
- Tap Set up or Edit limits on the “Daily limit” card.
- Follow the on-screen instructions.
To set time limits using your child’s device:
- Open Settings.
- Tap Digital Wellbeing & Parental Controls on Android 8.1 (O) and above. For other Android versions, tap Google and then Parental controls.
- Tap Daily limit to see the current settings.
- To edit Daily limit settings, verify that you’re a parent by signing in or using your Parent Access Code.
Note: The limits you set apply to each Android device your child uses. For example, if you set a 1-hour daily limit and your child uses 2 Android or Chromebook devices, their total daily allowance would be 2 hours.
To set screen time limits for individual apps:
- Open the Family Link
- Select your child.
- Tap Set limits on the “App activity” card.
- Find the app you want to limit.
- Tap on the empty hourglass icon next to the app and then tap Set limit.
- Define a daily time limit for the app.
- Tap Set.
Note: The time limit you set for the app applies to all of your child’s devices.
Built-in Screen Time Limit For iOS
The parental control feature built into the iOS operating system is quite literally called “Screen Time.” It is installed on iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. Apple’s Screen Time shows real-time reports on how much time your child spends on different apps and let’s set limits when necessary. You can access screen time directly on your child’s device or on a parent’s device through Family Sharing.
How to Manage Your Child’s Screen Time Through Family Sharing
- Open Settings and tap Screen Time
- Scroll down and select your child under Family.
- Tap Turn on Screen Time, and then Continue.
- Under Downtime, App Limits, and Content & Privacy set the rules and limitations that you want for your child. You can skip this step by tapping Not Now.
- Tap Use Screen Time Passcode, then enter a passcode when prompted. Re-enter the passcode to confirm.
- Enter your Apple ID and password. They can be used to reset your Screen Time passcode in case you forget it.
How to Set Up Screen Time Using Your Child’s Device
- On your child’s device, open Settings and tap Screen Time.
- Tap Turn on Screen Time.
- Tap This is My Child’s [device].
- Under Downtime, App Limits, and Content & Privacy, set the rules and limitations that you want for your child. You can skip this step by tapping Not Now.
- Tap Use Screen Time Passcode, then enter a passcode when prompted. Re-enter the passcode to confirm.
- Enter your Apple ID and password. They can be used to reset your Screen Time passcode in case you forget it.
Built-in Screen Time Limits: A Great First Step
The built-in screen time limits work well as an elementary layer of protection. However, certain issues and limitations prevent them from ensuring your child’s digital wellbeing. For example, Google Family Link parental controls only work until your child turns 13.
Additionally, these features usually work exclusively on a single operating system. So, if your child uses more than one device with different operating systems, you will need to set up screen time limits separately on each device.
For more comprehensive and convenient parental controls, you can use third-party parental control apps like Safes.
Safes — All-around Parental Control App for Android
How Safes Helps Your Child
• Protect from Harmful Content
Safes protects your child from inappropriate and harmful content to ensure their mental wellbeing.
• Form Healthy Digital Habits
Safes helps prevent harmful routines — i.e., video game addiction and unhealthy sleep patterns — and form positive digital habits.
• Keep Track of When & Where
Safes tells you where your child is and what they are doing with their device in real time.
• Pave the Way for Growth
Safes creates a safe and distraction-free space for your child to expand their mind and broaden their horizon.
• Create Customized Safety Plans
Your child is unique. Our flexible solution helps you create a customized digital safety plan that fits your kid’s unique needs.
Fully Packed for a Safer Digital Journey
Our parental control app for android offers everything you need to create a safe and distraction-free digital experience for your kids.
• Multi-platform Protection
Protect your kids’ online and offline presence on major platforms, including Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows devices.
• Detailed Activity Reports
Learn all about your kids’ digital behavior within seconds. Safes activity reports covers several bases, including screen time, app and social media usage, and blocked content requests.
• Screen Time Management
Set a screen time limit or a smart day-to-day schedule on your kid’s Android device to protect them from sleep disorders, excessive and harmful screen time, and distractions.
• Website Content Filtering
Block out inappropriate web content like violence, hate speech, and pornography. You can do this by adding specific URLs, content categories, or keywords to the block list.
• App blocker
Protect your kids from inappropriate, distracting, or addictive apps. You can block or limit your kid’s access to any app — like video games or social media — with our parental control app.
• Location Tracking
Keep your kids away from dangerous environments by keeping track of where they are in real time.
• Geofence
Create specific rules for specific places. Geofence lets you block irrelevant or distracting apps in various physical environments like schools. Geofence will also notify you when your kids check in or out of the perimeters.
• Battery Check
You can know the battery level on your kid’s android device at any time. Safes will also let you know when the battery level gets under 20 percent and needs a recharge.
• Science-based Profiles
Safes simplifies your monitoring process by suggesting profiles that apply psychologist-recommended rules and limits based on your child’s age.
• Uninstall Protection
Don’t worry about your kid bypassing your rules. Safes uninstall protection ensures only you can remove the app from your child’s device.
How to Set Up Screen Time Limits Using Safes
With Safes screen time feature, you can disable all phone functions – except calling and texting – on your child’s device. To set up screen time:
- Open your Safes parent app or web panel.
- Scroll down and tap Screen Time on the left-hand side menu.
- Tap Screen Time Limit.
- On the new page that opens, tap Edit on one of the week days.
- On the pop-up page, set the Start Time and End Time.
- Define the total amount of screen time you want to allow your child by setting Duration.
- Tap Set.
How to set up Smart Schedule to better protect your child
If you want to set time limits for specific apps like social media or video games, follow the steps below.
- Open Safes parent app or web panel.
- On the left hand-side menu, scroll down and tap Screen Time.
- Select Smart Schedule.
- On the next page, tap the app you want to set time limit for.
- On the Rule Detail page, choose Everyday to set a general rule for all week days or select Custom Duration to set different rules for different days like weekends.
- Set a Start Time and End Time.
- Specify the total amount of time you want to allow for the app by setting Time Limit.
- Tap Set.
Frequently Asked Questions
Have any questions? We’re here to help!
Excessive screen time can lead many physical and mental health problems including eyestrains, sleep disorders, headaches, and even depression and anxiety. Therefore, it’s important that you limit your child’s screen time protect them from these risks.
Yes. If you are setting screen time on your child’s device using its built-in features, your child can turn it off. So, make sure you protect the rules you set with parental PIN codes so that only you can change the settings.
Teens spend on average up to 9 hours on screens. This figure includes total screen time on all devices, both online and offline.
Here are the screen times recommended for children of different ages:
Under 2 years old: No screen time, except for video chatting with family or friends
2-5 years old: One hour of screen time under adult supervision
5-17 years old: about two hours per day, except for homework
If you see these signs in your children, they might be spending too much time in front of their screens:
Headache, blurry eyes, foggy brain, eye strain, sleep issues, tantrums, underdeveloped emotional skills, poor problem-solving skills, and weight gain.
