App to keep children safe on their tablets

catherine2006

I have two young children under ten who love their tablet. I have the app called screen time to manage their daily use but I'm looking for an app to screen what they watch as I'm sure they are accessing You Tube videos with swearing in it and stuff. I'm on BT but their WiFi parental controls stops me accessing stuff!!!! Is there an app which will stop them watching something that's unsuitable or too adult?

kwikbreaks

You can either block youtube (in a variety of ways) or allow youtube but the only program that can judge if what your child is watching on there is appropriate or inappropriate runs on the organic computer between your ears.

That said YouTube itself does have an adult content filter. There are a number of guides to setting that up. Here is one (which I haven't checked out myself) - http://www.tuaw.com/2013/05/23/parenting-tip-how-to-control-what-your-child-watches-on-youtube/

Lu_Lu

You can make you tube one of the blocked apps through screen time. I love screen time it's brill!

agrinnall

I've never looked at any access controls but what is the BT content control is stopping you from looking at? Are those things you could look at when your kids are asleep, at school or stopped by Screen Time from using their tablets? I'm assuming here that it's easy to vary the BT parental control settings.

paddyrg

It's impossible to automate parental supervision, so may be better to focus on education if you're allowing unsupervised surfing. The internet is not curated like TV, so anything goes anywhere anytime, and it's easy to end up in dark places.

andydiysaver

to my mind it's in the realm of white list not blacklist - I know network managers that disagree but I think it is the only way


to those none technical a black list is a list of banned sites the rest ok, a white list is a set number of sites that are ok the rest automatically banned


trouble with a blacklist is more horrible sites spring up daily


advantage with a white list - you know exactly what's ok, because the rest of the world by default, isn't

GollumFreestyle

I just tend to keep an eye on what they are looking at - but its usually games. - Even games cn be tricky though, ive known kids (not my own) to be able to purchase upgrades when using a tablet that is connected to an account.

usefulmale

Best app I know for this purpose is called Parent.

sillygoose

usefulmale wrote: »

Best app I know for this purpose is called Parent.

I sort of agree, but I have better things to do than look over their shoulders every single minute.

My method is I have control of the Google accounts their devices are registered to, they don't know the passwords. This causes them no inconvenience but means I can lock the maturity level on Play store and from any PC by logging into their Google accounts I can look at their search history and their Youtube histories (it hasn't occurred to them you can clear their histories yet!)

Its made clear to them that I will and do check. Youtube parental lock function is diabolically crap and doesn't even attempt to limit the comments posted on video either, really annoying as I don't want to block it as there is a lot of useful and enjoyable stuff there too.

Infact I had a word with my son the other day as he seemed to have been watching rather a lot of videos about the 'female form' (despite controls being on, useless Youtube!). Actually it was more innocent than it seemed, they were all funny 'fail' video's and no worse than 'You've been Framed' stuff. Annoyingly the uploaders often put a sexy picture as the index picture to try and attract viewers when listed graphically, they are nothing to do with the actual videos content.

All the Google searches on the device are locked in parental mode by me and so is iplayer.

Also use a DNS changing app to set the device to OpenDNS familyshield (free) which will block most the dodgy websites they may try to type in directly if say a friend suggests look at an address.

https://www.opendns.com/home-internet-security/parental-controls/opendns-familyshield/