Tech Support: How to limit kids' screen time

Yahoo Finance’s Tech Editor Dan Howley shares tips on limiting kids’ screen time during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Video Transcript

ADAM SHAPIRO: So a lot of parents are homeschooling their children, but there's also the issue of screen time for your kids. And if you wish, how do you keep that to a minimum?

To help us answer that is Dan Howley with today's tech support. Go for it, sir. Best outfit of anybody in a long time.

DAN HOWLEY: Yep. This is how I look in real life all the time, regardless of whether or not I'm on TV or not. But as you said, with summer vacation coming up, there is plenty of screen time available for kids. They can be on their phones playing with TikTok or using video games on their consoles. And after spending so much time in front of their screens towards the end of the school your, parents probably don't want that. So there are ways that they can limit screen time for their little ones.

Let's start things off with Apple. With iOS for the iPhone and iPod, you have a built-in setting called Screen Time that you can use to limit how your kids use their phones, what kinds of apps they're able to access, and how long they use them.

So to use this, you go into the Settings menu in your iOS device, and then go down to Screen Time. That's going to be the second block of options. Once you're down there, you'll want to tap Setup Screen Time for Family. Then you'll want to enter your kid's Apple ID and password, and this will allow you to set up restrictions on things like whether or not they can download apps. There's a setting there called Downtime which will set it up so that the phone actually turns off, essentially, except for emergency settings during the night. So if you don't want them using TikTok or Instagram in the middle of the night, you can do that.

There's also a feature called App Limits. That limits the amount of time in terms of minutes that a kid can use their devices. So, say, they're spending too much time on their web browser. You can limit that to an hour, two hours a day, and once they hit that limit, they're cut off.

After that, there's content and privacy controls, and that really is something that parents may be really interested in because it limits what kind of content kids can get through iTunes, through Apple Music, in Books, and even limits things on Safari that they can see. So a lot of restrictions there.

Google offers something similar. To use this, though, you're going to have to download an app called Family Link on your device and your kid's device. And once you're able to do that, you log into their account in Family Link, and then you'll be able to do things like limit mature content as far as games, movies, music, apps through the Play Store. You can set SafeSearch restrictions in Google, which is something that's very important. Make sure they're not searching around for anything that's inappropriate. And you can also do things like limit the amount of time they're spending in apps and even see where they are using GPS and Google Maps.

And as far as the consoles go, believe it or not, there are a ton of settings that you can set up for them there. For Microsoft, for instance, in their Xbox, you can go online to Microsoft's-- your Microsoft account in your web browser. They also have a new app that's coming out called Xbox Family Settings for iOS and Android. And you'll be able to do things like limit what kind of games they can play based on the rating.

So if they're younger, you can limit them to Teen and below. If they're older, you can maybe have them go into mature games. Probably not if you're setting up these settings, though. You'll also be able to do things like limit the amount of time they spend in games.

And then the same settings can be used for Nintendo and PlayStation. I like the feature for Nintendo though that literally lets you go into the app and just shut off the game and tell them let's go. It's time for dinner.

So there's tons of apps out there, tons of settings, and it's easy to take control of what your kids are doing on their devices if you want to.

JULIE HYMAN: Dan, is there an app that will make them stop whining when you put in all of these limits? I don't know.

Seriously, though, I want to ask him about YouTube in particular because my kids like to watch videos on YouTube, but I'm always worried that that algorithm that skews more and more extreme is going to take them down a weird rabbit hole. What settings are there on YouTube?

DAN HOWLEY: Yeah, you can set parental settings in YouTube. Sometimes what will happen is it'll actually send you off to YouTube Kids. If you don't want to do that, you can also set up mature-content guidelines in YouTube.

A lot of times where you're supposed to see is an age gate for things like, you know, video-game trailers. A lot of companies or users don't always set that though, so you won't see that all the time.

For YouTube, though, it is surprisingly scary for parents. If a kid gets a hold of it, they really do end up down these weird kind of rabbit holes, and then you're at, like, a truther website after you were looking at My Little Pony dolls. So it's a weird algorithm that they need to work on.

ADAM SHAPIRO: All right, Dan Howley, once again you leave us speechless. Thank you for being here with that update. And, Julie, don't spank your kids if they whine.