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During his last press conference, the President of the Republic announced his desire to regulate the time spent by children on screens. While awaiting the recommendations of a group of experts, expected at the end of March, there are easy-to-use tools to control the screen time of minors.
Whether your child uses a smartphone running Android or iOS, everyone has a program allowing easy access to the details of their daily activity. It is therefore important to activate this function if you want to know exactly what your children are doing with their smartphones. Please note: it is not a question of entering into their privacy but simply of controlling the time they spend on each application.
By default, Android offers a tool called “Digital Wellbeing and Parental Controls” (this title may also differ depending on the brand and the different Android overlays) which provides access to phone usage statistics but also to options for limiting the usage time of each application. parents who wish to go further can install a more complete parental control application, Family Link. Thanks to it, they will literally be able to “supervise” their child’s Google account and even geolocate it at any time.
If the child has an iPhone, his or her parents are invited to activate the option “Activity in apps and on websites” in the section dedicated to Screen Time, in the smartphone settings. It provides access to detailed weekly reports on the use of each smartphone application, but also to a tool allowing you to set limits if parents Please note that Apple also allows you to restrict access to certain types of content (music, video clips, films, etc.) and prevent you from making purchases in the App Store and the iTunes Store. .
In all cases, this allows access to precise statistics on the time (hours and minutes) spent each day on the different applications installed on the smartphone. This will allow you, at a glance, to determine which applications are most used and, if necessary, to discuss them with your children.
In any case, parents must communicate with their children about the use they make of their smartphone. If necessary, you should even discuss with them the limits to be put in place.