The hour on the PC is used up and the screen goes dark. Five minutes later the same child is on the sofa with a phone, still playing.
An hour on the PC, then an hour on the phone, then the tablet: if every device keeps its own clock, an agreement of “one hour a day” still counts as kept after three hours.
This is not a trick a child has to learn — it suggests itself. A limit that covers a single device does not limit screen time, it moves it. Anyone who has agreed on an allowance needs it counted across every device, or the agreement means nothing. How to set the allowance in the first place is a separate question, covered in how much screen time at what age.
In Salfeld Child Control this cross-device synchronisation is called roaming — it has nothing to do with mobile roaming. In the web portal you assign each device and each user to a roaming account, and from then on they all pay into the same clock.
An example. Your child has a Windows PC and a phone, and one hour a day is agreed. Both devices sit on the same roaming account. The child plays forty minutes on the PC and then switches to the phone: twenty minutes are left there, and the counter has already caught up by the time the device is picked up again.
The same goes for the settings. Shorten the limit on the PC and the change applies to the phone. Block a website on the phone and it is blocked on the PC. Group several apps together to limit them jointly — all games, say — and that group limit applies on every device in the account as well.
So you maintain the rules once, not three times.
The merge runs over the internet. If the phone has been without a connection for a while, it keeps counting on its own and reconciles as soon as it is back online. The logs show both side by side: the central roaming time and the time counted on the device. Briefly differing figures are normal, not a fault. Times and limits only line up reliably if the devices are online regularly.
Yes. Five roaming accounts are available and each child gets their own — their own devices, their own time, their own rules. That allows up to five children to be kept separate per web portal login; there is no limit on how many devices sit on one account.
Yes. When the limit is reached and you grant an extension, it applies to every device on the roaming account — so your child does not have to guess which screen the extra time landed on. You can grant it from the parent app on your own phone, without opening the portal. In older versions an extension only applied to the device where it was granted.
A shared time account takes the point out of switching devices: the agreed hour stays an hour, whichever screen it is spent on. And you make rule changes in one place instead of chasing them across every device. That is the real gain in family life — time limits stay negotiable without the administration growing with every new device.
Every step with screenshots is in the Roaming chapter of the manual.