TikTok Will Try to Lull Kids to Sleep to Stop Endless Scrolling

It’s 10pm, do you know where your children are? Odds are they are probably in their room scrolling on TikTok, but at least now you can rest assured that the app is taking steps to make them listen to lo-fi beats to chill to. TikTok announced that it will be introducing a new feature for users under the age of 16 that is designed to encourage them to wind down rather than keep watching.

The new feature, which seems will kick in automatically for users who have been identified as being under the age of 16, will introduce a full-screen “wind down” message that will encourage the teen to take a deep breath, exhale, and come to terms with the fact they have been cut off for the night. Teens can ignore the notification and keep scrolling if they want, but they’ll get hit with a second prompt that will once again encourage them to log off. TikTok says that over time, it’ll add meditation exercises to the prompt.

Now, will kids actually heed the warnings and wind down? Hard to say. TikTok claims that in the countries it has piloted the messaging in, “the vast majority of teens decide to keep this reminder on.” And there is some evidence to suggest that mindfulness reminders are a net positive. A 2020 study found that receiving mindfulness meditations can decrease stress for recipients, and a 2021 study found that teens in particular saw a decrease in rumination, anxiety, and negative repetitive thinking when exposed to meditation via mobile app. So there’s at least a little bit of evidence to back the general idea here.

We know for sure that limiting social media exposure is a boon for your mental health, but a big issue here is just the fact that it’s ultimately an opt-in situation. Are kids going to heed a message to get off the app, especially if it’s seen as intrusive or disruptive to their screen time? That seems less likely, but who knows? Maybe kids just need permission to stop scrolling.

Also, if you want to be cynical, TikTok is keeping kids in-app with its meditations, so it’s still finding a way to hook kids in. Hopefully, the app isn’t serving them ads during the wind-down, but it’s not hard to see how it could funnel them to an app like Calm or BetterHelp in some sort of cross-promotion. That isn’t happening, for the record, but like, is it hard to imagine happening eventually?

In addition to the wind-down message, TikTok also boasted some updates to its Family Pairing feature, which gives parents more control over their kids’ accounts. This includes a new Time Away mode that will allow a parent or guardian to set a schedule for a child’s access to the app. It’ll also allow parents to view who a child is following, who follows them, and who the child has blocked. Truly a helicopter parent’s dream.