Boys and girls are increasingly using Internet-connected devices with games, series, movies and applications. That is why it is important to know that parental control exists, what functions it has and what it allows us. If its use is not clear to you or why you should take it into account, we will explain what parental control is and what functions it includes or how we can activate it.
If there are small children at home or teenagers with access to mobile devices, you need to know what to activate, how to activate it or what advantages it has.
What is parental control
Parental control are the settings or tools offered by a system or application to monitor or supervise the use of a device by minors. It generally allows us to limit the type of content they have access to in addition to reporting on different activities, establishing schedules and routines for children, and blocking certain aspects.
We can apply parental control through a specific application or we can use settings that some applications offer us. For example, we can use apps like Family Link that control the entire device to set schedules or establish security controls… but we can also use parental control on platforms like Netflix, like YouTube and other websites and apps that have their own security system. control.
What features does it include?
It depends on the type of parental control that we use, we will have some functions or others to control minors. Depending on the application or program that we use, we have some controls or others to manage what children can do or cannot do. In addition, most applications allow us to choose the age of the minor because it will not be a similar process in the case of being three or four years old or fifteen or sixteen.
But generally there is a type of tools that we have:
- Control of purchases and downloads
Parental function applications or controls allow us to block the possibility of buying things. It happens on platforms like Amazon Prime Video where we can rent or buy movies, for example, or we can also activate it in app stores so they don’t buy games without our permission or without a password that we must enter.
- Time management
Many of the parental application programs allow us to set schedules, control. We can choose a maximum usage time that will cause the computer or tablet to turn off or become unusable after this time, but we can also set times for dinner, homework, etc.
- content restriction
In the case of many video platforms or series and movies, one of the most frequent uses by children, we can limit what they see and that there is only content according to their age. It happens on Netflix, on Disney+ or on Amazon Prime Video and HBO Max where we can create children’s profiles but YouTube also has a version for children only with things suitable for them.
- activity reports
Depending on the parental control you use or if you use more complete tools, we can have an activity report that gives us all the details about what the minor has done, what they have seen or how much time they have spent on each installed application or program and even what have searched the internet.
How to use it
How can we use parental control for a boy or girl ? We can use it on computers, mobile phones or tablets. As we have explained in the rest of the previous paragraphs, it will depend on the type of parental control you want to use that we must follow some steps or others.
One of the most complete tools is Google’s Play Family Link that we can install on a phone or tablet as long as we have created an email account for the boy or girl who is going to use it and that allows us to manage usage times, schedules, applications installed or even allows us to control the location in real time of the mobile or tablet.
If we want to activate parental control in streaming applications, the steps will vary depending on the chosen platform. In the case of Netflix, we can create a child profile from the “Manage profiles” page and, as you can see in the screenshot below, we can choose the level of protection we want based on age and an unlock PIN code.
In Windows we can also activate Microsoft parental control by creating an account for children with an email and password. We can activate age limits on applications and games, see an activity report, activate filters on pages and searches or set time limits and hours so that they cannot use it according to the time of day.
