Nintendo Switch Parental Cont‪…‬ 17+

What a game changer (no pun intended) for parents to have this app! I used to have to hide the switch in different places around the house to keep the kids off of it, which was creating a culture of sneakiness and dishonesty as my children would scour the house to find it and then hide under a bed to play with the sound off so I wouldn’t know. :(

I love that I can control the time they get on the device. I can tell my kids to get chores and schoolwork done first, and then they come and ask me for “their hour” (That’s all I want to give each of them per day). No more sneakiness happening around here, unless I forget to reset all the daily limits to 0 minutes at the end of the week. Which is what usually happens, because Monday comes around and I find a kid on the switch with the time I gave them last Monday. My one request to improve the app—a setting option that resets all the daily limits back to 0 at the beginning of the week. Then my life would be complete and full of sunshine and rainbows.

I was super excited to learn that the Switch had parental controls. Unfortunately the options are severely lacking, rendering useless the parental control feature. As others have mentioned, the inability to set parental controls (time limits, content ratings) for individual users is a complete non-starter. My next thought was to set a combined time limit for the whole family, and then use the app to monitor whether family members were self-managing and splitting the time equitably. This too is not possible, as the app’s accounting of time per user is wildly inaccurate. Lastly, it would be nice if two instances of the app could be linked to the same Switch console (e.g. both mine and my wife’s iPhones) for co-parent monitoring.

Assuming Nintendo fixes all of the above, this app could actually fulfill its assumed promise. From there it would be amazing to also be able to set parental controls for my kids’ Nintendo 3DS consoles using this same app. Even cooler would be if screen time limits per kid were enforced cross-device, which would allow parents to mange total daily screen time regardless of which Nintendo device their kids are using. After all, what’s the purpose of making parents establish Nintendo accounts and IDs for each kid if not to ultimately provide features like this? Or is it just so Nintendo can track, profile, and sell stuff to my kids? Disappointing.

During COVID, playing with friends has become both an important outlet and a concerning pattern and need for my 12 year old boy. Among other things when it comes to helping him be balanced with gaming and school and physical activity and etc, I would like more control over setting a time window with start AND end times that stick. And somehow my kid seems to play through the limits consistently when on Fortnite.

Honestly it makes me want to get rid of the Switch to get rid of that stress and conflict in my life because the way controls are designed now he feels like I am an enemy, doing something to him. It would be way better if there were a way for him to participate in a healthy way. I do appreciate that the controls exist at all but feel like it’s an MVP. I find myself wondering …how might the super smart Nintendo designers enhance what exists and create a kid-facing approach to help them be a part of learning to self-manage and monitor? Pediatricians and child development experts are clear that 2 hrs of screen time is a MAX for healthy well-rounded children, across all platforms. Let’s all work together to make that more viable? Thanks for asking.