Manage screen time in Windows
Nathan Taylor on how to set up screen time management on Windows.
You probably wouldn’t know it without diving deep into the Windows settings, but Windows now has some genuinely robust parental control features built in. Windows 10 Family allows you to apply content filtering to your kids’ online activities, to limit funds spent in online stores and control which Windows apps they can access.
One of its most useful features is the screen time limiting. As any modern parent knows, kids will spend roughly 100% of their waking time online if given the chance, and managing their screen time has become a significant part of modern parenting.
So let’s take a quick look at how to set up screen time limits on Windows.
Step 1: Creating user accounts
The first thing you need to do is create separate Windows logins/Microsoft accounts for each of your kids on the PC you’d like to have the restrictions on.
Head to Settings > Account. On the left, click on Family & other users.
You should see a list of all the people that have accounts on this PC. Typically one (yours) should be listed as ‘Adult’.
Then you use the ‘Add a family member’ button to flesh out your family. Click on the ‘+’ button under ‘Your family’. You’ll be given the option to create either a ‘member’ which is a family member that can be either an adult or child; or an ‘organiser’, which is an adult with the ability to manage Family settings. If it’s a child you’re adding, select ‘Add a member’. If it’s another adult, select ‘Add an organiser’ if you want them to be able to manage
Windows 10 Family settings, or ‘Add a member’ if you don’t.
You’ll need to enter the email address of the person being added. If you’re adding a child and they don’t have their own email address yet, you can click on the ‘Create an email address for a child’ link to create a new outlook.com or hotmail.com account on the spot for them. That account can be used for all Microsoft services, including Outlook, Xbox and One Drive.
If they have an existing email address, they will be sent an email invitation. If they accept, they will be added to the family, and, if it’s not already linked to one, a new Microsoft account will be linked to that email address.
Repeat the process for each family member that will be using this PC.
Step 2: Setting screen time limits
Back on the Family & other users Settings page, now you can click on ‘Manage family settings online’. This will fire up your web browser, opening up your Microsoft account page on the Family settings
( account.microsoft.com/ family/). On the page you should see an entry for each family member you’ve added. Now you can set the screen
time for your kids. Click on ‘Screen time’ below their name, and then turn the ‘Device limits’ switch to on (you can also have separate screen time limits for Windows and Xbox if you prefer). You’ll get the screen time matrix for each day of the week.
There are two ways to manage screen time: by allowing use only during certain periods, and by limiting the maximum time spent using a PC in a given day. You can do both, and the settings apply to all Windows PCs and Xboxes that they use their Microsoft account to log into, not just the one you originally set up the account on.
Clicking on the bar next to a day allows you to add or remove bands of time from their allowed screen time. There’s a default 7am to 10pm band allowed, which you can remove if you want to. You can have multiple bands in a single day (say, 7am to 9am and 8pm to 9pm) if you like.
If you want to set a maximum time spent online, then just click on the drop down list next to a given day in the ‘Time limit’ column. You can set up a max screen time in 30 minute increments. Once the child reaches the maximum screen time for the day, they will be logged out from Windows and won’t be able to log in again until the next day. If they’ve reached their limit and you want to allow more, then you can come back to this page and adjust the time limit upward and they will be able to log in again.
All done! Now that you’ve set up some baseline limits, you should take time to explore what else Windows 10 Family has to offer.
The Activity panel, for example, lets you see the individual apps that your kids are using, and it populates automatically as they use them. You can then set limits on those individual apps in the App and game limits section – so your kids can, say, use their educational apps as much as they like, but can only play Fortnite for a limited time. Content restrictions can limit what they see online, while spending limits allows you to give them an ‘allowance’, although that only applies to the Microsoft Store
(and who buys stuff from the Microsoft Store?).
It’s really worth diving into Windows 10 Family now. It’s a genuinely effective parental control platform, with features rivalling many commercial solutions, and well worth the time to explore.
The ideal solutions are ones that are multi-platform, providing a global screen time management solution that covers all platforms. That way your kids won’t be able to just jump to their mobile when their PC runs out of screen juice. Some of the best solutions of this type include Net Nanny ( www. netnanny.com, starting at US$55 per year), Qustodio ( www. qustodio.com, starting at US$55 per year) and Norton Family Premier ( au.norton.com/ norton-family-premier, starting at US$50 per year), but all these solutions have a price tag and don’t have free options apart from trial periods.
There are a few free mobileonly solutions available, however. One of the best is DinnerTime Plus ( www. dinnertimeapp.com), one of the few solutions in which the free version is actually useful and provides scheduling and time management tools. Other solutions with ‘free’ options, like Screen Time Labs or unGlue, usually put actual time management in the paid version, leaving only monitoring for the free version. DinnerTime, it should be noted, is only useful for managing Android devices (there’s an iOS app, but it’s for parents only), since restrictions on iOS prevent it from being managed in this fashion.