Best Parental Control Software for TikTok

The internet is full of trends that kids love to hop on to, but few are as popular as the social media app TikTok. Indeed, in 2020 it became the most popular app used by pre-teens and teens in the U.S., even putting it ahead of YouTube. But there are concerns about the app itself, and not just because it was almost banned by the United States government. Like any other social media app, kids face dangers from cyberbullying and predators. Although TikTok has improved its safety features to tackle bullying and harassment, it has also been accused of failing to act against child predators using the platform. However, there are active steps parents can take to ensure their kids are safe while using TikTok – even the option to block it completely if necessary.

Giving you the ability to monitor just about every aspect of how kids spend their time online is Mobicip. With millions of families using the app, it’s one of the most popular parental control tools on the market. Mobicip allows you to remotely monitor your child’s activity from your own device as well as set up schedules to limit screen time, which then locks the device when the time has elapsed. The app also uses a mobile device’s GPS to track your child’s location. When it comes to TikTok, Mobicip doesn’t let you monitor your kid’s activity on the app, but you can block access to the TikTok website or app to stop them from using it altogether. Mobicip covers up to 15 devices and is available on Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, Kindle, and Chromebook. There’s also a 7-day free trial to thoroughly test out the software first.

A great all-around solution for parents is Qustodio. The software gives you all the important features you need to keep kids safe online, like comprehensive content filters, a flexible scheduler, and a panic button. Using the dashboard parents can read reports on exactly how much time their kids spend on a device, what they’ve been searching for, and what websites they’ve visited. The latter is particularly useful as it uses Web of Trust to give you an overview of whether or not a website is appropriate for your children. With Qustodio you can also monitor and block specific apps, which is a great help for managing your child’s access to TikTok. Qustodio is available on all the major devices and you can choose between a free and premium version of the software.

As the name suggests, Bark acts as an online guard dog to keep your kids safe. Impressively, Bark uses artificial intelligence to detect online threats by analyzing images, audio, and text from your child’s phone. Bark does all the basics right too, including content filters that block specific categories and give kids the ability to request access to a blocked website. But Bark is the top dog when it comes to social monitoring. The software analyzes a child’s interactions on a whole host of apps including TikTok, and if the AI notices something concerning it notifies parents via the app. Bark is available on Amazon Fire tablets, desktop computers, Android, and iOS – although it isn’t able to monitor TikTok on iOS. New users can test out the software first through its 7-day free trial.

TikTok has extensive safety tools to help parents keep their kids safe on the platform, which have improved over time. One of those solutions is called Family Pairing, which lets parents or guardians link their account to their child’s account. This enables parents to manage how long kids can use the app (with limits from 40 to 120 minutes), restrict what content they see, block particular searches, turn off direct messaging, and much more. It really is quite impressive when compared with other social media platforms that don’t put in as much effort. But there is one snag with this: any child that already has an account has to agree to the account link and they’re able to disable Family Pairing at any time – although parents will get notified if a child does this.