swerte gaming What to Know About Limiting Your Child’s Screen Time

Attention, parents with “screenagers”: The U.S. government has issued a public warning that scrolling through apps like TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat may pose serious risks to your child’s mental health.

In a 19-page report, Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy said on Tuesday that while social media offered some benefits to younger people, including the ability to connect with communities, it also exposed them to potential harms, such as cyberbullying and content that promotes eating disorders, self-harm and other destructive behavior. Social media also hurts exercise, sleep and other activities, he said.

What can parents do? One is to explore potential options to limit children’s screen time. Let’s go through them.

Google’s and Apple’s mobile operating systems offer free tools that can be effective for restricting screen time on smartphones and tablets. These tools allow parents to monitor and set limits on their children’s devices.

For Android devices, there’s Family Link, an app that must be downloaded through the Google Play Store. From there, parents can set up a child’s Google account to be monitored with the software. For parents who use iPhones and want to manage their children’s Android phones, there is also a Family Link app for iOS.

For iPhones, Apple’s iOS includes a tool called Screen Time, which can also limit the time that someone spends on the device. It can be activated inside the iPhone’s settings app by following Apple’s instructions.

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Among national universities, Princeton was ranked No. 1 again, followed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard. Stanford, which tied for third last year, fell to No. 4. U.S. News again judged Williams College the best among national liberal arts colleges. Spelman College was declared the country’s top historically Black institution.

Calls for school crackdowns have mounted with reports of cyberbullying among adolescents and studies indicating that smartphones, which offer round-the-clock distraction and social media access, have hindered academic instruction and the mental health of children.

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