Believe it or not, there is an easy way to monitor what your child is doing on the Nintendo Switch without being a helicopter parent. If you have the Parental Control app downloaded (if not click here to find out how) there is a wealth of information available to you. You can see a breakdown of playtime and games played by day or a monthly summary that outputs the data in many different ways.

Time Played

If you open the Parental Controls app you will see a clock icon with “time played” in the bottom left. This will open a list of daily playtime. The current day will have the most recent playtime and the time last updated, letting you easily monitor daily play times.

Each day will have the amount of play time as well as a photo of the profiles used. If you select one of the days it will break down the total play time by profile. There will also be an icon of the games opened during this time. If you click on the games it will further break down the amount of time each game was opened. Other things that may be noted are; time spent on other activities, I.e. using the home menu or system settings, these are not attached to a specific profile. It will also be noted if the software was downloaded on a specific day.

Monthly Summary

The monthly summary has a calendar icon in the middle of the bottom banner. The monthly summary analyzes more data to give you a monthly report. When you open the summary you will see the following

• The current month with Navigation arrows to the left and right
• list of all of the profiles used
• option to choose Days or Time

If Days is selected you will see:

• The number of days played and a (+ or -) compared to the previous month
• The top 6 most played games by day and how many days it was played
• A calendar with the days colored orange that the switch was used
  • If you click the calendar it will further break down the data into the day and the amount of time played

If Time is selected you will see:

• The average time played per day and (+ or -) time from the previous month
• The top 6 most played games by time played

When you open the monthly summary the information defaults to the total of all profiles. If you would like the individual data for a specific profile, you can click on that photo. You can then see all of the data mentioned above broken out for the specific profile you chose.

If you discover your child is spending too much time or using content that you do not approve of then check out my other posts to see how to add parental controls to your switch system.