Using parental controls the right way can make it easy to keep your kids safe online – we’ll show you what you must do.
Your kids are online – and if you figure they’re not right now, give them five minutes and you’re almost certainly going to be wrong.
The online sphere is absolutely part of their lives, and as parents we all want the best for our kids, including protecting them from potentially dangerous or unwanted content online. While the Internet can deliver a rich bounty of educational opportunities and entertainment to your family, it’s not without its risks, too.
The good news here is that there’s a wide array of Internet parental controls you can use to constrain your offspring’s online activities, leaving them plenty of the good stuff while not overstepping into areas that they’re best off not being involved with. This guide will walk you through the basics of parental controls – what they are and how to set up controls for most of your kid’s most common online activities.
Parental Controls for online activities are a useful tool, but they should never be the only approach you use.
The most powerful tool you have to keep your kids safe online is you, end of story.
Be part of the conversation around online use with your kids, make them part of the discussion about the parental control tools you’re using, and you’ll be setting them up for making better and safer online decisions down the track when they’re ready to do so. Simply thinking that you can set-and-forget parental controls and leave the technology to do the parenting is unlikely to end well.
What Are Parental Controls and Why Do They Matter?
There’s nothing that can quite compare to hands-on guidance from you as a parent when your children are online; you’ve got the best possible relationship with them and while they might not always respect the guidelines you try to put down, having them spoken out loud at the very least creates the boundaries that you want in place.
Those boundaries will vary by family of course, and that’s fine too – what you want to do is make sure that your kids are safe according to your own personal or cultural values.
The problem is that you can’t always be there when your kids are online, and that’s where parental control apps have enormous value, supporting those decisions you want to make about what’s suitable for your kids and what isn’t, as well as potentially restricting the quantity of time they can spend online or the applications they can use.
That kind of control is especially important given the wide array of ways that young people use the Internet. Teenagers and kids are far more likely to be using any given service if it’s available online rather than in the real world than any other age group, and that’s not surprising. After all, the Internet has been a part of their lives for as long as they’ve been alive. They genuinely don’t know any other kind of world.
The digital lives of younger Australians more frequently take place on everything from laptops to tablets, gaming consoles to smartphones and everything else that can connect online for social activities, research, shopping and communication.
One extremely important note to make here is that no parental control will ever be 100% effective; like any other kind of parenting decision, it’s an ongoing matter that does require both some thought in how you set them up, but also in how you manage them over time. They can be a great tool in helping your child manage their own online activities and safety online as they grow but knowing that you can change how they work – and you’ll probably need to – is also important.
Types of Parental Controls Available
Broadly speaking, most parental controls break into one or more categories:
Screen time control: How long your child can use a device, app or website service
Content control: What kinds of online material your child can (or cannot) access, sometimes classified by content category in the same way movies are, or sometimes by specifying a web site, app or service
Communication control: What services can your child use (or not use) to communicate with other online users – this can include email, messaging services and some in-game services depending on the platform.
One factor to take into consideration is that you can apply parental controls at a different number of levels of control, depending on what it is you want to either observe or restrict.
Many devices will offer parental controls that operate across most of the applications on that device; those are the type that you’d set on a smartphone, tablet or computer. Some of these controls purely operate on the device itself, while others may integrate with wider online controls that work at the account level.
Some apps also include parental filters or are built specifically for younger audiences in mind. YouTube Kids is a good example of this, as it’s meant to only be a playground for content suitable for a younger audience where the “full” YouTube experience may include content you’d rather they not experience.
Depending on the model and capabilities of your Wi-Fi router, you may also be able to apply parental controls at this level. That’s more typically a feature of more high-end routers than the default ones given out by ISPs, so taking this path may involve buying a little additional hardware.
Many of those router-based services operate on a subscription basis, but the power here is that because your router is the effective gateway to the Internet at large, controls installed here can stop multiple devices from accessing inappropriate content rather than having to configure it on each device in turn.
These router-level controls will often integrate with an app that you’d install on your own smartphone so you can monitor your child’s activities or set specific parameters around screen time or content availability. Many of these apps can also be installed on both your child’s devices and your own if your router doesn’t support that kind of feature as software in their own right.
Managing Screen Time
How much screen time is too much? Everyone’s likely to have a slightly different answer to that question depending on their viewpoints and their children but simply letting your kids be on screens 24/7 isn’t likely to lead to positive results.
It’s also a question that will vary by age; the needs of an early primary school kid for online time should normally be less than those of a high school child who has more homework to do.
Being realistic, most kids aren’t going to spend all their time in research; they also want (and it’s not the worst idea) to explore the wider world and have some social time with their already-online friends.
It’s a really good idea before you set screen time boundaries to discuss them with your children, because that again sets expectations in their minds while letting them feel like they’re part of the conversation rather than just being presented with a block of “rules” that stifle their desires for more online time.
Every parent wants to protect their children, but as they grow older it’s also important to let them have a little independence. Making them part of the screen time discussion from an early age sets an appropriate level for that kind of personal growth while allowing for online safety as well.
There are a variety of tools that can manage screen time for child devices. While there are third-party apps that you can use, some of which offer more detailed features, the good news here is that for the most part for simply limiting time access, most platforms have inbuilt tools that you can set up to manage your family’s screen time.
If you’re on Microsoft Windows, you can set up controls through its Microsoft Family Safety platform that will apply across any Windows PC that your child signs into with their Microsoft account.
If your family setup is built around Apple Macs, there are inbuilt Screen Time features available within the Mac’s System Settings app that allow you to set per-app time limits and a simple PIN on supported devices, and the same functionality is available for iPhone and iPad devices as well.
If you’re using Android it can vary a little depending on the brand of phone and especially the Android version, though most newer devices running Android 10 or better should have access to Google’s Digital Wellbeing platform, which includes both a global timer for overall access as well as per-app time limit functions if needed; you may also want to consider using Google’s Family Link app to achieve similar results.
When to Get Professional Help Setting Up Parental Controls
As a parent, you’ve got a lot going on and making sure the controls you want to manage your children’s online activities might seem like a lot to handle on top of your existing workload.
That’s where Geeks2U can help, offering professional setup services that can assist you with setting up and maintaining appropriate safeguards for your children’s online activities no matter what mix of devices you have that need optimisation, or if you find that your children are subverting them, troubleshooting how to get those devices back on track – though we’ll leave the discussion you need to have with your kids if they are breaking the rules up to you!
Our dedicated technicians are also available for guided one-hour sessions that can take you through the basics of online parental controls, how to set up realistic guidelines for your kids and, as required, actually implementing those tools on a device of your choice, with additional time available to be booked if you need multiple devices configured.
We can guide you through in a way that leaves you in control of the way your own home’s parental controls are implemented, leaving you in a more empowered state to then modify rules as needed as your child grows or deal with newer concerns as and when they emerge.
We’re also available to help with any ongoing issues around parental control features, so if you do find yourself concerned down the track, we’re just a phone call away and always ready to help.
FAQ: Parental Safety Controls
-
How do I set up parental controls on iPhone/iPad?
Apple’s iPhone and iPad platforms place their parental controls mostly within the Settings App, under Screen Time. Here you can set not only screen time parameters, but also wider access restrictions for apps, websites and content types.
-
How can I block websites or apps?
This does depend on the device in question, but most devices with some level of parental control will either let you specify apps or websites that aren’t allowed to be run without parental approval – typically with a password or biometric unlock – while others may specify by category to potentially limit a wider range of activities on that device.
-
Why aren’t parental controls working?
There can be a variety of reasons why parental controls aren’t working. Firstly, check that they haven’t been specifically disabled on the device your child is using, and that they don’t have access to devices that haven’t been configured within your parental control group.
If you’re blocking content or apps based on a list of apps or sites, it’s also possible your child might be accessing a new app or site not already blocked, whether deliberately or not. It’s also important to ensure that devices are kept up to date, as older versions may no longer be supported for every feature.
Also check if your child’s device is online; if they’re looking at downloaded content or apps that don’t need an internet connection, their screen time might not be being “counted” as it can’t communicate back the quantity of time being used.
-
Can parental controls manage screen time for multiple devices?
They can, especially if you use wider platform that works from an account or router-based approaches where you can specify those features either for specific devices in some cases, or via a child’s specific login, which can allow you to set a total number of screen time hours across all devices.
