Limits, blocks and controls for children

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 that it offers us a system or an application to monitor or supervise the use made by minors of a device. 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 from platforms like Netflix, like YouTube and other websites and apps that have their own control system.
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
applications or parental function controls they 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.
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 age-appropriate content. 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.
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, on 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 Play Family Link de Google 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, installed applications or even allows us to control the real-time location 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 page “Manage profiles” 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 in apps and games, view an activity report, activate filters on pages and searches, or set time limits and hours so they can’t use it based on the time of day.