TikTok safety guide for parents

TikTok is a free entertainment platform that lets you create, share and watch short clips. The app is popular for short-form content of all genres including dancing, history, news and more. Several musicians rose to popularity after users shared their music widely on TikTok.

As a video-sharing platform, TikTok is one of the most popular platforms available among teens. To help promote safety and wellbeing of teens, TikTok introduced Family Pairing. There are also several screen time and safety features available in-app.

TikTok’s minimum age requirement

13 is the minimum age according to TikTok’s Terms and Conditions. However, the Google Play Store marks it as requiring Parental Guidance. Additionally, the Apple Play Store says it’s for 12+.

There are additional age restrictions with TikTok for some features, which require users to be 16 or 18. Be sure to read the Terms of Service along with Community Guidelines for full information.

What can you find on TikTok?

TikTok is a popular source for short videos up to 60 seconds of everything from popular songs to comedy sketches to bite-sized news and more.

All content is user-generated and must follow Community Guidelines. Moderators will remove content that breaks these rules.

TikTok Shop

TikTok Shop is a feature available within the TikTok app. It allows businesses to sell items directly on the platform, which means it can reach a wide range of teen users.

If your teen uses this feature to purchase items:

• Make sure they stay within TikTok rather than going to another site.
• Help them check whether a seller is trustworthy by searching for reviews outside of the shop.
• Encourage them to check with you before buying to make sure items are legitimate.
• Report any content that goes against the platform’s terms and conditions.
• Set boundaries around spending in the app such as requiring your teen to talk with you before making a purchase.

Once signed up and logged in, you can either search for popular categories, creators or known friends. You can also create the videos yourself. But many people, including teens, just use the app to follow content creators.

TikTok teen accounts

Users aged 13-17 have several restrictions placed on their account automatically. Some of these features can be edited while others remain until the user reaches 18. However, some only impact children aged 13-15.

These restrictions help to manage children’s wellbeing and safety, so it’s important that they’re honest about their age when registering.

Features impacted by teen accounts include:

• Notifications: These are automatically turned off for teens overnight to encourage sleep.
• Private accounts: Teens’ accounts are automatically private. However, they can change them to public unless Family Pairing is used.
• Daily screen time: Teens automatically have a daily screen time limit of 1 hour. They can edit this to be more or less.

We recommend exploring your teen’s TikTok account with them when they register to fully understand all available safety and wellbeing features.

TikTok Family Pairing

TikTok Family Pairing is a type of supervision tool that parents can use to support their teen’s safety on TikTok. When connected with your teen’s account, you can help manage screen time, contact with others, notifications and more.

While a great tool, its safety is most effective when coupled with regular conversations with your teen about their online life.

See how to set up Family Pairing here.

Teens like that it allows them to express themselves through short-form video clips to gain a following and build a community around their passions.

It also features some great special effects that users can apply to their videos to make them more unique. You can also cross-post the content on other platforms (such as Instagram) to share it with more people.

Parents’ concerns

Seeing inappropriate content

Parents have expressed concerns about the inappropriate language of some of the videos posted which may make this less suitable for younger children.

Contact from strangers

Predators seeking to connect with children is another privacy and security risk on TikTok. Set up privacy and security settings to limit this contact.

• When you download the app, users can see all the content without creating an account although they are not able to post, like or share anything until they’ve set up an account on the app.
• By default, all accounts are public so anyone on the app can see what your child shares. However, only approved followers can send them messages.
• Users can like or react to a video, follow an account or send messages to each other, so there is the risk that strangers will be able to directly contact children on the app.
• Children may be tempted to take risks to get more of a following or likes on a video so it’s important to talk about what they share and with who.
• Need to delete your account? Go to Me > Tap …, located on the top right corner>Tap Manage account > Delete account. Follow the instructions in the app to delete your account.

The TikTok Playbook

Advice for teachers and parents.

Family Pairing

TikTok’s biggest safety feature is the type of built-in parental control called Family Pairing. It allows parents to connect their own TikTok account to their teen’s. It gives you an overview of their activity and allows restrictions around privacy and screen time.

Private account

Parents can use Family Pairing to ensure their teen maintains a private account. This means that only people they accept as followers can see their content. Teens can also do this without Family Pairing but cannot change it if a parent sets the restriction.

You can also further customise who can see individual videos, leave comments or use videos for duets and stitches.

Reporting and blocking

You can block or report a user or content that doesn’t follow TikTok’s Community Guidelines within the app.

While many teens are aware of these features, many do not use them, so it’s important to remind them that using the features is anonymous. It also helps make the platform safer for everyone.

Users can also remove unwanted content from their feed as well. They can do so by tapping the share button on the video they’re watching and selecting ‘Not interested’. You might need to do this multiple times to ‘teach’ the algorithm properly.

TikTok parental controls guide

Learn about all safety settings on TikTok.