How to control your child's hours of play with the Nintendo Switch

Did you know that there are applications that help you control the time your children spend with the game console? Here's how you can use them to monitor and help them manage their gaming time.

Mobile parental control apps rely on timers for kids and notifications for parents. The idea is always to create a record of the hours that the little ones spend in front of the screens or the game console.

Nintendo has its own parental control app for the Nintendo Switch

The parental control app for the Nintendo Switch already has more than 100,000 downloads. And it has recently been updated to include exciting new features, such as log download functions.

Nintendo Parental Control lets you know exactly how much time each family member spends playing games, and compares it to time spent on other activitiesIn addition, the app can be configured to share the data with a second supervisor and download the files with the records.

On the other hand, we can control which console users download new games. The supervising adult will receive mobile notifications every time a family member initiates a download.

And to ensure access to the console on special occasions, the new version of the application offers the possibility to override alarms and parental controls for 24 hours .

The application can be downloaded from Google Play to install on Android phones. For it to work, it will be necessary to connect it to the Nintendo Switch console that we want to control.

Parental Control Apps for PlayStation and XBox One

So far, Sony and Microsoft have not released applications equivalent to Nintendo's Although the PlayStation and Xbox One have functions of parental control on the console itself, it is not possible to perform remote control or monitoring from the mobile.

However, there are many parental control apps that can be applied to any activity.They work with a chronometer and notification system and help us to know, for example, the time that children spend in front of the tablet or playing a certain video game.

The best way to set limits is to use a time management application (such as aTimeLogger) keep a full record of the times spent on different activitiesof the day. We would only have to create a special category for video games, from the Types tab.

Could be used, for example, for children to write down the beginning and end of the time they spend playing. Each time they use the console they will then record the data, which will then remain in the app to create daily and weekly statistics.

aTimeLogger can also be used to keep track of the hours spent sleeping, walking, reading, eating, etc.

Logically, the main disadvantage is that control or monitoring depends directly on the children. As there is no official XBox or PlayStation application, we cannot remotely connect the console to the adult's mobile to monitor.

On the other hand, you can also use specific apps to control the time and activities of the little ones on the Internet, when they use their mobile phones or tablets.