Games
What the Nintendo Switch Controls Can Do
The Switch has some of the best parental controls in gaming, and most of them are in a separate app on your phone, which is why most families never find them.
Most of the controls are in an app
Nintendo puts the time limits and a daily and monthly report of what got played in a separate Parental Controls app that goes on your own phone. The console can block games by age rating on its own, and everything else is in the app. It works really well, and it's invisible if nobody tells you it's there, which is pretty much the only reason people don't use it.
What the online part opens up
A paid online subscription lets your kid play with people outside your house. On the Switch 2, voice and video chat are built into the console, and a kid under 16 needs you to turn them on in the Parental Controls app and approve who they chat with. On the original Switch, voice chat goes through a separate Nintendo Switch Online phone app, so the conversation your kid is having often isn't coming out of the TV at all, and that's why it's so easy to miss.
The friend code question
Adding a friend usually takes a code, which really is better than being matched with random players, though they can also send a request to somebody they just played with online. And kids trade those codes at school and in Discord servers. So it's still worth asking who's actually on that list instead of assuming the code system took care of it.
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