By Gavin Boyle
PlayStation wants to keep its youngest gamers safe.
Sony Child Safety Director, Sean Whitcomb, shared the company’s efforts to promote safety among its users and encourage parents to have an idea about the people their kids game with.
“We offer some family management tools that will help them create an experience that is really about sharing boundaries and conversations that aren’t really controlling but are more about connecting,” Whitcomb told Fox News. “We’re making it easier for this to be a safe experience that everyone is comfortable with.”
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To promote safety amongst its younger users, Sony released a PlayStation Family App for parental controls this month to help simplify the process of monitoring how your kids are using their gaming console. The app allows parents to receive real-time notifications, manage playtime and spending and receive daily and weekly activity reports.
“We’re excited to bring an easy way for parents to manage their children’s gaming directly from their mobile devices. This is just the beginning with our new mobile app – we’ll plan to continue adding enhancement to PlayStation Family app to evolve the experience over time,” Sony said in a blog post.
Executives at Sony also encourage parents to have conversations with their kids about healthy gaming habits rather than simply setting controls on the app without discussing your decisions with your kids.
“Video gaming is supposed to be fun, and you can have connections and shared experiences while you’re setting up the controls,” said Catherine Jensen, the global VP of consumer experience and creative services at Sony Interactive Entertainment. “So don’t just pass over the console and the controller to your kid. Sit side by side and talk about the choices as you’re setting up the account and what those mean.”
Whitcomb shared a similar sentiment, encouraging parents to consider playing the games alongside their kids to better understand what they are engaging with.
“Maybe pick up a controller and play with them too. That’s probably one of the easiest ways to understand what your child is experiencing,” Whitcomb said, while also offering suggestions on questions parents can ask their kids. “It’s more like, well, who is this person? How old are they? Where do they live? And why do you want to spend more time playing with them? So, it’s just a conversation that I really recommend parents have with their children.”
These tighter parental controls at Sony come as video games become a place where more and more bad actors turn to reach children. At the same time, gaming offers considerable problems on its own as 8.5% of young gamers struggle with gaming addiction. It is encouraging for Sony to offer parents a streamlined way to access their parental controls and monitor how their kids are using their gaming consoles.
Read Next: Just How Susceptible Are Teens to Gaming Addiction?
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