Fresh off a brief U.S. ban and amidst ongoing legal drama related to allegedly fueling a youth mental-health crisis, TikTok announced new measures on Tuesday for teen safety and parental control.
“Every day, teens around the world express their creativity, connect with friends, and learn on TikTok. We build the strongest safeguards into teen accounts by default to help ensure young people have positive experiences on our app—and to give parents peace of mind,” said the short-form video app in a press release.
“Today, we’re expanding our family features to provide parents with more options for tailoring their teens’ account,” it continued. “We’re also introducing a feature to help teens build balanced digital habits.”
The main new feature, Time Away, expands the already in-place Family Pairing to allow parents a way to block their teens from being TikTok during times that they control by setting a recurring schedule; teens can request extra time, but parents make the final decision.
Among the other new safety, wellbeing, and privacy features, aiming to allow parents “increased visibility into their teen’s network,” include:
- A feature that allows parents to see who their teen is following, who follows them, and which accounts their teen has blocked
- A new incentive to switch off at night: If a teen under 16 is on the app past 10pm, their For You feed will be interrupted with a new wind-down feature that’s a full-screen takeover of meditative prompts (“Relax your mind… Inhale…”) with calming music. If the teen stays on the app after the first reminder, a second, harder-to-dismiss full-screen prompt appears.
“We designed these features to reflect best practices in behavioral change theory by providing positive nudges that can help teens develop balanced long-term habits,” the news release explains. “In countries where this has already been piloted, the vast majority of teens decide to keep this reminder on.”
In the coming weeks, TikTok will test the addition of meditation exercises to the wind down reminder, it says, “as research shows that mindful meditation can improve sleep quality.”
Jill Murphy, chief content officer for Common Sense Media, applauds TikTok’s latest efforts.
“I think it’s always a step in the right direction when a company like TikTok or any social platform takes the digital well-being of their users overall, and especially teens, into consideration,” she tells Fortune.
But, she adds, it’s certainly not the end of the story.
Why the new TikTok features are not enough on their own
Research has found evidence that TikTok use among children, some as young as 11, included elements of addiction; it’s also found that underage social media use is linked with greater symptoms of depression, eating disorders, ADHD, and disruptive behaviors. In 2024, surgeon general Vivek Murthy called for a surgeon general’s warning on social media platforms.
And social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has placed blame for the youth mental-health crisis squarely on smartphones and social media. Because of this, he urges parents to help prevent social media overuse before it starts, advocating for no smartphones until high school, no social media before the age of 16, phone-free schools, and more unsupervised play and childhood independence.
It’s all why experts believe the new tools, which might indeed be helpful, need to be employed by parents in tandem with other steps.
“I want to emphasize that technical solutions are just one part of the puzzle,” says Murphy, who plans on trying out the new Time Away feature with her own teen. “But I do think, in general, parental controls are just not a set-it-and-forget-it solution.”
She points out how Common Sense Media research consistently shows that open, ongoing conversations between parents and teens is actually most important, acknowledging that it’s “heavy lifting,” but essential. And testing out parental controls like the new ones from TikTok could be just what parents need to communicate about the issues.
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“There’s going to be frustration, a complaint, and that’s fine. That’s what it should be that evokes a dialogue. So preparing for that and expecting that, I think, is another essential part of parenting around digital media,” says Murphy, highlighting Common Sense’s Ultimate Guide to Tiktok, which offers parental guidance on such discussions to subscribers.
Devorah Heitner, author of Growing up in Public: Coming of Age in a Digital World, is also a big believer in open communication between parents and teens, and in less phone time altogether.
“Putting the phone away or keeping it out of the bedroom is more likely to promote sleep than calming music forced into your feed at 10pm,” she tells Fortune. “Parents and teens should be talking regularly about how to balance connected time on social apps like TikTok and crucial aspects of life, including sleep, in person time with loved ones and more.”
She adds that, “Ideally, teens can share with parents some of what they are seeing in algorithmic apps like TikTok. They should be learning about misinformation and algorithms in digital education programs at school.”
Bottom line, says Murphy: “It’s great to have features like this, but I think parental controls, just by their very term, gives this kind of false sense of security—like that is all I need to do to change my teen’s behavior,” she says. “Again, it’s a great added feature. But it’s one tool in the overall tool belt.”
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