A day after Google rolled out long-awaited parental controls for YouTube Kids, Facebook has unfurled a version of the highly-requested feature in its own child-focused app. Facebook Messenger Kids finally has a time limit setting to let youngsters know when to go to bed.
Sleep Mode is a new parental control feature for Facebook Messenger Kids that gives parents the ability to lock their children out of the app at a certain time — be it during dinner, homework, or at bedtime.
Messenger Kids already lets parents control their childrens’ contact lists and view their messages via the parents’ app control panel in the main Facebook app, but the lack of time limits has been a glaring omission since Messenger Kids was released late last year for iOS devices. Facebook announced an Android app in February.
Sleep Mode is pretty simple. From the existing Messenger Kids controls in the main Facebook app, parents can tap on a child’s name, then enable the new Sleep Mode option. The app controls give parents the option to set different times for weekdays and weekends, and configure start and stop times for when Messenger Kids will lock the young user out.
The app will then pop up a message telling kids it’s in Sleep Mode. They can’t send or receive messages and video calls, play with the augmented reality camera filters, or receive notifications until Sleep Mode ends.
Facebook Product Manager Tarunya Govindarajan announced the feature in a blog post, and recommended that parents set boundaries and lay out ground rules for their children’s tech use. The company offers additional resources in its Parents Portal.
There are also plenty of reasons to be wary of apps like Messenger Kids and YouTube Kids. Facebook’s kid-focused messaging app has received significant backlash from child advocacy groups and others. PCMag recently spoke to Antigone Davis, Facebook’s Head of Global Safety, who acknowledged that the social network has a responsibility to work with families when creating experiences for the next generation of tech users.
“It’s almost like training wheels. We want to really have conversations about what’s appropriate when you’re interacting through messaging and give [parents] an opportunity to talk about what this is and how it impacts you,” Davis said. “That’s Facebook’s — or any technology company’s — opportunity at this moment in time. Let’s give parents those tools. Let’s give them the information. Let’s find ways within the products themselves to help with that.”
As for the question of whether kids should be using these apps at all, Facebook’s rationale is that children are already online and that parents have asked the company for a safer environment: “Messenger Kids was definitely about what families were telling us that they needed,” she said.
