Netflix is adding new parental control features to make safe watching easier

If you're letting your kids watch a bit more Netflix than usual now that we're all stuck at home, you've likely thought about monitoring their activity a little more closely. Netflix knows parents worry about screen time, so the streaming platform is adding even more features to make the service more family-friendly. Starting this week, parents will be able to better monitor and take control of what their children are watching in more customizable ways than ever. Here's what's new:

There are more PIN options

Previously, Netflix offered a PIN protection option to lock all content at a particular maturity level from your children, as well as locking specific shows or movies. But now you can also lock entire profiles behind a PIN, so kids won't be able to access shows outside of Netflix Kids just by switching to mom or dad's profile.

You can fully block specific titles

Instead of just locking specific shows with a PIN, you can completely filter them out. With this option, blocked titles don't even show up on the browse screens or search results ("Sorry kids, it looks like Netflix doesn't have that one anymore!")

Titles are categorized by national rating systems

Rather than filtering content based on broad age categories like before, Netflix is providing an option based on rating systems in each country—such as C, C8 and G in Canada or the US equivalents: TV-Y, TV-Y and TV-G—which should help your kid from developing sassy behaviour beyond their years (because let's face it, when your four-year-old hits you with, "Whatever, mom," you know they got that from a show for older kids, right?)

You can view their watch history

If you simply want to know what shows the kids are watching, you can now view each profile's watch history. Neat!

You can turn off autoplay

Lastly, to help deter kids from binge-watching for hours on end, you can now turn off the autoplay option for specific profiles.

Of course, parents should feel free to use these new controls as much or as little as fits their parenting style, especially in these strange times we've found ourselves in. But at least you know what options are available if you need that Paw Patrol theme song to just cool. it. for. a. second.