What are parental controls?
Parental controls are the names for a group of settings, that put you in control of what content your child can see. Combined with privacy settings these can help you protect your children from the things they shouldn’t see or experience online.
For all their many joys, mobile devices can expose your kids to content you’d rather they didn’t see. The good news is that your Android smartphone or tablet comes with built-in tools that can help you ensure your little ones can access only age-appropriate content – and, as we’ll discover, those tools are effective and straightforward to use.
In this tutorial, we’ll show you how parental controls work on a standard Android smartphone. Note that some other Android-powered devices may have their own, manufacturer-specific parental controls. For example, the Kindle Fire tablet from Amazon has Amazon’s own versions of parental control software and an Amazon-exclusive parent dashboard. Plus, devices such as the Kurio Tab Connect have kid-friendly software overlaid on the main Android operating system. However, the screens you see here will apply to the majority of recent Android devices.
Here, we’ll look at two apps: the Google Play Store app, and the Google Family Link app. Although Family Link is primarily an Android app, you can also install it on iOS to create and manage user accounts. If your child is under 13, both the Android and Apple versions enable you to create Google accounts for the
Install Family Link
If you want more complex parental controls, you need the Family Link app from the Google Play store or iOS App Store. This enables you to create a family group by inviting family members via their Google Accounts (or creating new ones, for under-13s), and once you’ve set it up, you can set limits on a per-account basis, not just one device.
Family Link enables you to set time limits and bedtimes, block or allow specific apps, locate devices, and hide specific apps altogether. It will also notify you if your family members try to download apps from the Play Store, allowing you to approve or deny the request.
That’s not all. Family Link can limit apps’ access to hardware features such as the microphone or camera, too; it can set the filtering preferences for the YouTube Kids app, and manage SafeSearch settings for Google web searches. You can do some of these things via the Family Link website (families.google.com), but features such as screen-time limits are app-only.
No parental control system can prevent your kids from seeing 100% of unsuitable content – and, of course, it can’t stop them seeing inappropriate content on friends’ devices. But Google’s tools are very good and should give parents some much-needed peace of mind.
How parental controls work
You can set up parental controls for Apps & Games, Music, Movies, TV, and Books, but the way parental controls work varies across each type of content. Read the sections below to learn more.
Android’s parental controls live inside the Google Play Store app, so you’ll need to open that on the device on which you want parental controls to run. Depending on the specific version of Android you have, you’ll either see the three-line ‘hamburger’ menu icon in the search bar at the top, or you’ll have a tappable profile picture as shown here. Tap on it and then on Settings.
You should now see several options in the Settings page. The one we want is Family. Tap on the arrow at the right of the screen.
When you tap on the arrow it will expand the section, enabling you to see the available options and the current status of the parental controls. If someone hasn’t already set up parental controls for this device, it should say that parental controls are off. Tap on that option to continue.
Before you can adjust the parental control settings, you need to turn parental controls on. You can do that by tapping the button at the top of this page. As you’d expect, you hit the same button if, for whatever reason, you want to turn parental controls off again.
You should now be returned to the Settings > Parental Controls page, this time with the message “Parental controls are on” at the top. You can now tap on the kind of content for which you want to add restrictions. In this example, we’ll adjust the settings for apps and games.
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