Blocking Software and Apps
Plenty of good choices are available if you want to use one of the many site-blocking programs. Some programs are designed to monitor your child’s activities on mobile devices and computers. NetNanny is highly rated and monitors, restricts, or controls your children’s internet viewing. If your child uses an Android or iOS mobile device, reliable parental control monitoring apps include MamaBear and Qustodio.
Free Parental Protection Options
Before you start shopping for software, you can take some free steps to protect your kids. If your family uses a Windows computer to search the internet, set up Windows parental controls. This step is effective, but don’t stop there. You can also enable parental controls on your router, your kids’ game consoles, and their mobile devices. Even YouTube has parental controls. A couple of examples are SafeSearch with Google Family Link and Internet Explorer’s parental controls. Google Chrome doesn’t have built-in parental controls, but Google encourages you to add your children to its Google Family Link program. With it, you can approve or block apps your child wants to download from Google’s Play Store, see how much time your kids spend on their apps, and use SafeSearch to restrict their access to explicit websites in any browser. To activate SafeSearch and filter explicit search results in Google Chrome and other browsers:
Restrict Browsing With Internet Explorer
Open the Content Advisor window to block adult websites in Internet Explorer. If you’re using IE 10 or 11, you’ll have to enable Content Advisor, however, it’s not supported in Windows 10 version 1607. If you’re using IE9, you can get to Content Advisor from Internet Explorer instead of using the command below. Go to Tools > Internet Options and then click the Content tab. These are your options in Content Advisor:
Ratings: Set rating levels for language, nudity, sex, violence, and other categories. Approved Sites: List any websites your children are allowed to see even if they’re blocked with the rating setting. You can also explicitly block websites if a rating doesn’t restrict it. General: Allow or block your child from seeing websites that have no rating. You can also use this area to restrict Content Advisor settings with a password; the password also lets you unblock a website on-demand if it’s blocked for your children but you want to give them one-time access.
