Family safety: Feedback on recent changes to multi-device management

Hi Webkins,

I'm glad it's working for you now!

Regarding your question about Store - do you have a separate thread created for that?  This thread is more about multi-device management, and it doesn't seem like that's what you're having trouble with.

Good afternoon Jennifer and thank you for being a constant participant on this thread. Please do whatever you can to provide the option to manage a child's time across ALL devices and not just PER device. I would hope this would be one of the secret options. In our instance our child can use multiple devices in the household and we would like to limit him to 2-3 hours of screen time on weekdays. It is not feasible to limit PER device at 0.5 hours to achieve that value and it is even more useless to allow 2 hours PER device because that equates to 6-8 hours in our household.

Thanks again!

Hi Mlambert,

Here's the thing - the time limits already weren't being aggregated (the website has made that clear for years), so that behavior isn't any different than before.  If your child had access to more than one device and their time limit setting of a max of 4 hours, he/she would have been able to use one device for four hours, and then a second device for another four, etc.  The setting to choose a single start time and a single end time is new. (instead of the blocks in a grid thing) 

In your case, the way it works today may be ok, because you still have control over what hours the child can log in.  So on weekdays, if you set him up to only be able to use his devices from 4-8, for example, that would give him (and you) some flexibility in which device is used, but the max time could still be controlled.  What I do in my own home is exactly that, but my daughter knows she is responsible for keeping her total time under three hours each day.  

Just remember that if you upgrade those devices to Windows 10, the place you will make settings changes is the profile on the account.Microsoft.com/family site that shows your son's MSA.  Then everywhere he logs in with that MSA, the settings will be applied.  Each non-Windows device will still have its own profile that you'll have to manage separately, as explained before, though. 

I hope that helps -

what I really want to know is how my wife can "add more time" on our kids computer when it runs out. I have tried posting this as a separate questions, but nobody from Microsoft will reply other than to give me a useless response telling me how to setup family safety, which is already setup obviously.

Both me and my wife are setup as admins on all the computers. We are both added as ADULTS on family safety

====  read that bit again, as it is important. Please do not send me a link on how to setup family safety and add an adult, this has already been done as stated otherwise we would not currently be using family safety ===

But when my kids run out of time on their computer, it only allows me to add more time, there is no option to change the user, so my wife cannot login to add more time. The same occurs on all the computers for all the kids.

This cannot be done via the family safety website either, as there is no such option to just give a block of time, you would have to change the daily quota, and thus they would get that extra time every single day. So it has to be done on the childs computer.

Jennifer,

Thank you very much for taking the time to respond. While limiting time frames during the summer are not feasible I appreciate the suggestion. I guess I was mistaken on how the screen time limits actually worked, but that is great to hear about the Windows 10 functionality. Maybe that would some day apply to Xbox... wink wink. Thank you for the clarifications.

Have a great day!