PBS Kids Gives Parents an App to Monitor Children’s Screen Time

Managing children’s screen time has been a perennial concern for parents -- even back when there was only one screen in the home to monitor.

PBS Kids has applied a contemporary solution to this familiar parenting challenge: An app that allows parents to monitor which videos their children watch on PBSKids.org, what games they’re playing on the site and what they’ve learned along the way.

The new PBS Kids Super Vision app even lets parents set a timer that effectively puts the PBSKids.org site to sleep when it’s bedtime, dinner time or simply time for the child to move away from the computer screen.

“The kids know that there are rules, and when the show is over that’s enough -- but I like having that reinforcement,” said Abby Jenkins, a mother of two boys, ages 2 and 5, who has had access to a pre-release version of the app as a PBS employee.

PBS Kids Digital Vice president Sara DeWitt said the app was developed in response to a series of focus group meetings with parents, who said they think of PBS as educational but don’t know enough about the programs or the educational skills these shows seek to develop.