TikTok has over 2B downloads across Google Play store and Apple App Store. The app is very popular across the globe, and your teen may have it installed on their phone. TikTok is a “wild” platform, meaning as a parent, you need to monitor your teen’s activities on the app.
Luckily, TikTok has good built-in parental control features. It helps parents set rules on how their teens will use the app. Unfortunately, these features are not available in every country. In addition, the parental control restriction works only on the app. Your child can bypass these restrictions by logging into their account on the browser.
However, we recommend using TikTok parental control because it is free, unlike third-party parental control apps that require a monthly or yearly subscription. Also, your teen can uninstall the app without your knowledge, unlike Family Pairing on TikTok, which lets you know when it is disconnected.
What you need to know about Family Pairing on TikTok
TikTok has a Parental Control feature called Family Pairing for monitoring your teen’s activities by linking their accounts to yours. Once you have linked your child’s account to yours, you can monitor their activities and set some restrictions.
- Screen time management: As the name suggests, you can control how long your child spends on TikTok daily.
- Restricted mode: It means you can filter content that appears on your child’s feed on the app.
- Direct message: You can restrict direct messages or who can send messages to your child. In addition, who sees their liked videos or leaves comments.
Also read: How to monitor Instagram on your child’s phone for free
How to set up Family Pairing on TikTok
You can only monitor your child’s account after setting up family pairing. After setting the feature up, you can set time limits, who can send messages, pause push notifications, filter search by restricting some keywords, limit profile availability, and restrict comments and likes on their content.
Of course, you need to have a TikTok account before you can monitor your teen account. After creating and logging into your account:
- Tap on your Profile at the bottom right corner.
- Click on the three lines at the top right corner.
- Click Settings and privacy
- Tap on Family Pairing and click Continue.
- Select Parent when prompted for a QR code to appear.
- You can use the send link option to send the invite to your teen
- Head to your Teen Account, click on the profile picture, and under settings, tap Family Pairing.
- Tap continue and select teen.
- With your kid’s account, scan the QR code on your device to link both accounts.
While setting up Family Pairing lets you monitor TikTok on your teen’s phone, there are ways they can bypass it. Because the feature only works on the app, they can switch to the web version, and you cannot monitor their activities. In addition, they can open a new account while you monitor the old one. Fortunately, with a parental control app, you will be one step ahead of your kids when they want to bypass your TikTok restrictions.
You can block TikTok both on the web and app with a parental control app. You can set a time limit on the app usage or make the app inaccessible throughout the day. In addition, if your Kids decide to get a new TikTok account, it will not be possible.
How to monitor TikTok using Parental Control apps
There are many apps to monitor TikTok, but only a few have been tested and proved they can do the job. These apps have features not available in Family Pairing, which include time limit increments, blocking TikTok on the web, and much more.
Qustodio
The Qustodio Parental Control apps seem made specially for TikTok. It has some features not available on the Family Pairing. They include the ability to set a time limit for TikTok in 15-minute increments.
In addition, you can block TikTok on your teen’s phone and get an alert when they try to access the app. The restricted time feature helps set specific times you want your kids to use TikTok. And because you can block TikTok on both the app and the web, your kids can not bypass these restrictions.
Interestingly, the Qustodio app has an activity report that shows how much time your teen spends on TikTok. They are grouped into daily, weekly, bi-weekly, and monthly. With those stats, you will know how best to limit your kid’s activities on TikTok.
Bark
Bark is another Parental Control app to efficiently monitor TikTok. The app makes it simple with its content filtering, which has about 15 categories to detect when your child is being bullied or hate speech. With Bark, your children still have their privacy as the app only shows inappropriate messages depending on the content filters.
Like other parental control apps, you can block TikTok both on the web and app, making it impossible for your kids to bypass any restrictions. We recommend Bark when you do not want your kids scrolling through TikTok when they should be in the class.
However, some of these features are only available on Android. Apple iOS makes it hard to install some of these apps, and even when you do, some features are limited. We understand that message filtering is not available on iOS, but Android users can enable it.
Conclusion
Family Pairing on TikTok remains the only free way to monitor TikTok on your kid’s phone. Unfortunately, it has limited features, which third-party parental control apps offer. Hence, if you want total control over your teen’s use of the social media platform, we recommend paying for any of the third-party apps listed above.
